Mimbl - Component Authoring Library

Mimbl is a TypeScript/JavaScript UI authoring library that combines declarative and imperative programming in one package. Mimbl is React-like library, which leverages Virtual DOM and employs constructs very similar to those of React. Mimbl also provides some unique features allowing more flexibility for developers.

Features

Mimbl provides all the standard functionality that developers expect from component authoring libraries: declarative laying out of HTML structure, function- and class-based components, references, error boundaries, lazy-loading, etc. In addition to this functionality Mimbl provides the following unique features:

• Functional and class–based components as well as custom Web elements.
• Built-in trigger-watcher mechanism that re-renders components upon changes in the observable properties.
• Partitioned components that allow independent re-rendering of portions of a component.
• Component events - just like HTML element events.
• Custom DOM attributes defined by developers and supported via handler objects.
• Service publish/subscribe mechanism.
• Defining styles using Mimcss CSS-in-JS library.
• Full support for MathML elements.

Installation and Usage

Mimbl is provided as an NPM package. Install it with the following command:

npm install mimbl

The Mimbl library provides a custom JSX factory function called jsx. In order for this function to be invoked by the TypeScript compiler, the tsconfig.json file must have the following option:

"compilerOptions":
{
    "jsx": "react",
    "jsxFactory": "mim.jsx",
    "jsxFragmentFactory": "mim.Fragment",
    "experimentalDecorators": true,
    "useDefineForClassFields": false,
}

The .tsx files must import the Mimbl module as mim. Mimbl uses the Mimcss library for managing CSS styles; therefore, it is also imported here.

import * as mim from "mimbl"
import * as css from "mimcss"

// Define a component
class HelloWorld extends mim.Component
{
    @mim.trigger color: css.CssColor;

    constructor( color: css.CssColor = "black")
    {
        super();
        this.color = color;
    }

    render(): any
    {
        return <div>
            <button click={[this.onChangeColor, "red"]}>Red</button>
            <button click={[this.onChangeColor, "green"]}>Green</button>
            <button click={[this.onChangeColor, "blue"]}>Blue</button>
            <span style={ {color: this.color} }>Hello World!</span>;
        </div>
    }

    onChangeColor(e: MouseEvent, color: css.CssColor)
    {
        this.color = color;
    }
}

mim.mount( new HelloWorld());

For more details please see the following resources:

• Documentation
• API Reference
• Playground