DIO

A Library For Building User Interfaces.

• ~8kb

Support

• Edge
• IE 9+
• Chrome
• Firefox
• Safari
• Node

Installation

Direct Download

<script src=dio.min.js></script>

CDN

<script src=https://unpkg.com/dio.js></script>
<script src=https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/dio.js></script>

NPM

npm install dio.js --save

Getting started

dio.render(
  h('h1', 'Hello, world!'),
  document.getElementById('root')
)

Links

1. Introduction
2. API
3. REPL

Features

The following is an overview of the features afforded.

1. Rendering

   1. Elements
   2. Components
   3. Primitives
   4. Fragments, Arrays, Iterables
   5. Comments, Portals, and Promises

2. Components

   1. Functional stateful components
   2. Class stateful components

3. Events

   1. Functions, EventListener or an Array of either.

4. Errors

   1. Error boundaries marked by the componentDidCatch lifecycle.

5. setState

   1. Object
   2. Promise

6. Async Lifecycle

   1. async componentWillUnmount
   2. async getInitialState

Example

The following overloaded example presents a few features detailed above, namely – error boundaries, an implicit setState return, Promise setState and rendering Promises & Fragments.

class Input {
	// error boundary
	componentDidCatch (err, {componentStack, origin, message}) {
		return {error: true}
	}
	// isomorphic async getInitialState
	async getInitialState() {
		return {value: 'Hi!'}
	}
	// implicit promise setState
	async handleInput({target}, props, state) {
		return {value: target.value}
	}
	// rendering promises
	async render(props, {value, error}, context) {
		// error state
		if (error)
			return h('h1', 'Something went wrong!')

		// fragments
		return [
			h('input', {
				value: value,
				// bonus: events preserve "this" reference
				onInput: this.handleInput
			}),
			h('p', value)
		]
	}
}

dio.render(h(Input))

Goals

Public react compatibility with an edge, this should mean that most react libraries can work as long as they does not make use of undocumented/public features, for example API's prefixed with unstable_ and vice-versa.

Comparison, React

Custom Renderer, Factory

Affords the same ability as React to create your own renderer.

Portals, Event Bubbling

Events bubble in Portals as you would expect them to in the DOM, this avoids issues such as #11387 where bubbling through the virtual tree has some unintended behaviors.

In addition createPortal supports string selectors and server-side rendering portals, a feature that might also make it into react: related issue.

Events, Delegation

In contrary to the assumed pros of event delegation a general purpose event delegation model is intentionally avoided to avoid the performance and memory pitfalls that come with re-implementing this at the level of abstraction that JavaScript affords, when considering the standard event bubbling behaviour that the host platform implements. That is to say, implementing such a system involves doing more work than the host platform would otherwise do.

Hydration, Self Correction

Hydration goes the whole 9 yards to correct differences when hydrating, where React might otherwise error or ignore.

Error Messages

As opposed to React, the concept of developer warnings in a development build does not exist, The semantics that surround error boundaries help provide error messages when they occur at runtime.

Tradeoffs

Community.

React has a big community.

Warnings

React has developer build warnings.

Edge

Supporting Promises

The ability to render Promises makes support for code-splitting and lazy loading straight forward when supported at the library level. The ability to use a Promise for initial state makes data fetching more declarative and the ability to update state with a promise allows you to deal with async services without cutting back on the declarative nature that is afforded to other first-class citizens.

class Input {
	async getInitialState() {
		return await fetch('service/')
	}
	async handleInput({target}, props, state) {
		return await fetch('service/?value=${target.value}')
	}
	async render() {
		return h('input', {
			value: value,
			onInput: this.handleInput
		})
	}
}

Supporting Delayed Unmount

It is no surprise that declarative entry and exit animations in React are not at its best compared to other first-class citizens.

Allowing a means to declaratively define a delayed unmount that can enqueue exit animations before an unmount goes a long away in reducing the abstractions that go into dealing with this in its absence.

class Input {
	async componentWillUnmount(node){
		return new Promise((resolve) => {
			node.animate([...], {...}).onfinish = resolve
		})
	}
	async getInitialState() {
		return {value: 'Initial value!'}
	}
	async handleInput({target}, props, state) {
		return {value: target.value}
	}
	async render() {
		return h('input', {
			ref: 'input'
			value: value,
			onInput: this.handleInput
		})
	}
}

Event "this"

React events outside of createClass components have an infamous relationship with .bind. The implementation details allow us to avoid this relationship and additionally allow multiple event handlers for a single event.

class Input {
	handleSubmit(e, props, state) {
		this instanceof Input
	}
	handleReset(e, props, state) {
		this instanceof Input
	}
	render() {
		return h('form', {
			onSubmit: [this.handleSubmit, this.handleReset]
		})
	}
}

Async Generators

Support for async iterators works much like regular iterators, but instead of a sequence of elements involve a sequence of states. This allows synchronous designs to emerge from otherwise asynchronous programs.

class Suspense {
	async *render() {
		yield 'Loading...'
		const data = await fetch('./')
		yield h('pre', JSON.stringify(data))
	}
}

Server Side Renderer

Rendering promises/awaiting promise states is afforded to components within the context of renderToNodeStream allowing both the previous example uses of async getInitialState and Async Generators to render just as well when delivering a rendered payload from a server.

Custom Components

Custom components are components that instantiate their own host elements. Within a DOM context a custom element constructor might fall under this group of components.

class WordCount extends HTMLElement {
	// ...
}
customElements.define('word-count', WordCount)

This allows us to render the given WordCount custom element without afore knowledge of its defined localName.

render(h(WordCount))