MAFIU (My Awesome Framework Is Unnecessary)

Overview

It was only a matter of time before I decided that what the world really needed was another frontend framework. The plan here is to do as little as possible to make Web Components more framework-like to work with. Using MAFIU is the same as using native Web Components, just with a little more built-in stuff.

• Every component has a built-in state.
• The component automatically updates when the state updates. MAFIU automatically provisions getObservedAttributes and attributeChangedCallback for you.
• Component state change callbacks powered by Proxies.

And that's it. Those are the only features, because Web Components themselves should do most of the heavy lifting.

Implementation

When registering a custom Web Component, you extend a class and overload some methods. This usually looks something like:

window.customElements.define("your-component-name", class extends HTMLElement {
  static getObservedAttributes() {
    return ["a", "list", "of", "attributes", "that", "should", "trigger", "attributeChangedCallback"]
  }
  attributeChangedCallback(name, oldValue, newValue) {
    // Update the component HTML, call APIs, whatever
    doStuff(name, newValue)
  }
  constructor() {
    // Initialize internal state, set HTML, etc.
  }
  onConnectedCallback() {
    // Do stuff when element is added to the DOM
    // This is when attributes become available
  }
})

MAFIU just creates a Web Component under the hood, but lets you be way more declarative:

registerMafiuComponent({
  name: "your-component-name",
  template: "<div>Some arbitrary HTML string with references to the state variables: {{state}}</div>"
  data: {
    "your": "component",
    "state": "data"
  },
  hooks: {
    "state": [
      (value) => console.log("Oh look, someone updated the state: ", value)
    ]
  }
})

This will generate an anonymous class similar to the previous snippet and call window.customElements.define automatically. The other important thing going on here is that the data value is actually optional. It's only needed if you want to provide initial/default values or if you have a hidden state. Otherwise, the state variables can be inferred from the template itself.

Usage

In the simplest case, your component registration could look something like this:

// In a file called user-profile.js
{
  const name = "user-profile"
  const template = `
    <image class="profile-picture" src="{{userPicture}}"/>
    <div class="user-name">{{userName}}</div>
  `
  registerMafiuComponent({
    name,
    template
  })
}

<!--When using your component-->
<user-profile userPicture="//uri-of-profile-picture.com" userName="Matthew Bernardo"/>

In this example, information would get processed as follows:

• The programmer will see the name of the component
• The programmer will see the markup that defines the appearance of the component.
• The programmer will see the names of the state variables.

This is (subjectively) a good information digestion process.

Demo

Want to see a site that is completely vanilla except for some Mafiu components? Check this out.