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Show HN: Aberdeen – An elegant approach to reactive UIs

(aberdeenjs.org)
224 points vanviegen | 1 comments | 09 May 25 12:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.322s | source

Yes, another reactive UI framework for JavaScript. Bear with me, please... :-)

I 'invented' the concept for this back in 2011, and it was used (as a proprietary lib) in various startups. Even though many similar open source libs have been released since, and boy have I tried a lot of them, none have been able to capture the elegance and DX of what we had back then. I might be biased though. :-)

So I started creating a cleaned-up, modern, TypeScript, open source implementation for the concept about five years ago. After many iterations, working on the project on and off, I'm finally happy with its API and the developer experience it offers. I'm calling it 1.0!

The concept: It uses many small, anonymous functions for emitting DOM elements, and automatically reruns them when their underlying proxied data changes. This proxied data can be anything from simple values to complex, typed, and deeply nested data structures.

As I'm currently free to spend my time on labors of love like this, I'm planning to expand the ecosystem around this to include synchronizing data with a remote server/database, and to make CRUD apps very rapid and perhaps even pleasurable to implement.

I've celebrated 1.0 by creating a tutorial with editable interactive examples! https://aberdeenjs.org/Tutorial/

I would love to hear your feedback. The first few people to actually give Aberdeen a shot can expect fanatical support from me! :-)

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Etheryte ◴[09 May 25 14:06 UTC] No.43936929[source]▶
Conceptually, this sounds incredibly similar to what Vue was in the 0.x stage. Are you familiar with Vue perhaps? What would you say are the core conceptual differences? At a glance, both aim for the same idea, that your data is proxied, you detect what changes actually matter, and you try and wrap all of that up in a neat little package. These days of course Vue is a larger beast, but I feel like the origins were very similar to what you have here. Interested to hear what you think about this comparison.
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lucasacosta_ ◴[09 May 25 14:30 UTC] No.43937206[source]▶
At first glance and on a syntax level, Vue from the start had part of its code in html syntax and the rest on JS. Aberdeen goes fully into JS.

So if I get it right, in Aberdeen there would not be any pure html written at all, right? Is that the "ideal"? Or it would be more of a hybrid with Aberdeen accompanying plain html?

replies(1): >>43937303 #
vanviegen ◴[09 May 25 14:40 UTC] No.43937303[source]▶
Correct!

As far as I know, Vue has always had its own HTML-based template engine, with special HTML attributes for conditions, loops, etc. Different trade-off.

Since Vue 3, it does indeed rely on `Proxy` for its reactivity, like Aberdeen.

The idea is the write whole applications without HTML. We've done some pretty big projects in this style, and in terms of DX and velocity it's actually really good. Recycling (tiny) components becomes really easy, as it's all just JavaScript functions.

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1. lucasacosta_ ◴[12 May 25 14:29 UTC] No.43963402[source]▶
Considering there's no written html and no server side, how do you deal with SEO? (taking into account the possibility of non-JS agents)