proto-player-wc

a technology POC...

usage

yarn install
yarn demo

features

• stencil based web component
• uses mitt for an eventbus
• a single player component (on the root page)
• many activator components (can be floating elements)
• activators use the eventbus to communicate to the player
• player has an overlay and iframe
• player uses postMessage to communicate to/from iframe
• uses a resize-iframe message to pass size back to the player web component

architecture

The architecture for this is a decoupled (ie. loosely-coupled) one, where there's a single player component (on the root page) and potentially many activator components on a page. A simple event bus is used to tie everything together and the only connector is activate events which the player component listens for. This means it's also possible to create and emit these activate events directly from code on the page, even if you choose not to use the activator web components.

This approach allows for the activator web components to be placed anywhere on the page (simple or floating elements). The only real coupling is the event bus name, which you pass to all of the individual web components on the page. This allows for the integrator (ie. consuming application) to define the name used for the event bus on the window object.

The player component lives on the root of the page and is essentially an invisible element (0x0) on that page. It provides a simple overly and a psuedo modal which displays the actual player within it. The toplevel wrapper in this modal is an iframe which gives us the ability to isolate ALL of the idiosyncrasies of the actual player from the composing application.

We recommend using mitt for the event bus because of both it's simplicity and size (only 200 bytes).

integration

At a minimum, an integrator would need to add the following to their page:

1. create an event bus using mitt
2. store this event bus on the window object with a name
3. add the proto-player web component to the base page
4. add one or more proto-activator web components on this same page
5. pass the name of the event bus to all of these web components, using attributes
6. Done, it just works...

articles

• The ultimate guide to iframes - LogRocket

references

• mitt - tiny 200 byte functional event emitter / pubsub.