mercury
A truly modular frontend framework
To understand what I mean by truly modular just read the source
Examples
Hello world
'use strict';
var document = require('global/document');
var hg = require('mercury');
var h = require('mercury').h;
function App() {
return hg.state({
value: hg.value(0),
channels: {
clicks: incrementCounter
}
});
}
function incrementCounter(state) {
state.value.set(state.value() + 1);
}
App.render = function render(state) {
return h('div.counter', [
'The state ', h('code', 'clickCount'),
' has value: ' + state.value + '.', h('input.button', {
type: 'button',
value: 'Click me!',
'ev-click': hg.send(state.channels.clicks)
})
]);
};
hg.app(document.body, App(), App.render);
Basic Examples
Intermediate Examples
- TodoMVC
- markdown editor
- number-input
- serverside rendering
- login form
- geometry
- 2048 (wip)
- github issues (wip)
- hot reloading with browserify or webpack
Unidirectional examples
The following examples demonstrate how you can mix & match
mercury with other frameworks. This is possible because mercury
is fundamentally modular.
Disclaimer: The following are neither "good" nor "bad" ideas.
Your milage may vary on using these ideas
Motivation
Mercury vs React
mercury is similar to react, however it's larger in scope,
it is better compared against om or
quiescent
- mercury leverages
virtual-domwhich uses
an immutable vdom structure - mercury comes with
observ-structwhich uses
immutable data for your state atom - mercury is truly modular, you can trivially swap out
subsets of it for other modules - mercury source code itself is maintainable, the modules it
uses are all small, well tested and well documented.
you should not be afraid to use mercury in production
as it's easy to maintain & fix. - mercury encourages zero dom manipulation in your application code. As far as your application is concerned
elements do not exist. This means you don't need to reference DOM elements when rendering or when handling
events - mercury is compact, it's 11kb min.gzip.js, that's smaller than backbone.
- mercury strongly encourages FRP techniques and discourages local mutable state.
- mercury is highly performant, it's faster then React / Om / ember+htmlbars in multiple benchmarks
TodoMVC benchmark
animation benchmark
TodoMVC benchmark source - mercury comes with FP features like time-travel / easy undo out of the box.
- mercury is lean, it's an weekend's read at 2.5kloc. (virtual-dom is 1.1kloc, an evening's read.)
compared to react which is almost 20kloc (a month's read)
Modules
mercury is a small glue layer that composes a set of modules
that solves a subset of the frontend problem.
If mercury is not ideal for your needs, you should check out
the individual modules and see if you can re-use something.
Alternatively if the default set of modules in mercury doesn't
work for you, you can just require other modules. It's possible
to for example, swap out vtree with
react or swap out observ-struct
with backbone
See the modules README for more
information.
Documentation
See the documentation folder
FAQ
See the FAQ document
API
WIP. In lieu of documentation please see examples :(
Installation
npm install mercury
Development
If you want to develop on mercury you can clone the code
git clone git@github.com:Raynos/mercury
cd mercury
npm install
npm test
npm run tasks
npm testruns the testsnpm run jshintwill run jshint on the codenpm run discwill open discify (if globally installed)npm run buildwill build the html assets for gh-pagesnpm run exampleswill start a HTTP server that shows examplesnpm run distwill create a distributed version of mercurynpm run modules-docswill (re)generate docs of mercury modules
Inspirations
A lot of the philosophy and design of mercury is inspired by
the following:
reactfor documenting and explaining the concept
of a virtual DOM and its diffing algorithmomfor explaining the concept and benefits of
immutable state and time travel.elmfor explaining the concept of FRP and having a
reference implementation of FRP in JavaScript. I wrote a
pre-cursor tomercurythat was literally a
re-implementation ofelmin javascript
(graphics)reflexfor demonstrating the techniques used to
implement dynamic inputs.
Contributors
- Raynos
- Matt-Esch
- neonstalwart
- parshap
- nrw
- kumavis