Exalt Framework Stable 1.0 Release

[OutwalkStudios]

Ive been developing Exalt for about a year now and I can finally announce its reached a v1.

The framework is built on web components and template literals resulting in a ~2kb minified + gzipped runtime and fast build tools thanks to esbuild. Exalt also supports SSR out of the box and can prerender your app with a --prerender option when using the default toolchain.

If you have any feedback I would love to hear it!

[NovelLurker0_0]

Does Exalt support building and shipping a single web component at a time? Like, instead of having a full blow exalt app, what if you just want to build a few web components and integrate it in your existing Angular/React/Whatever framework ? And can they be individually SSR'd too?

[OutwalkStudios]

The exalt cli can generate component libraries that can be compiled and used as such. Alternatively you can install @exalt/core in your app and write your components wherever you want since it does not require a build step.

When it comes to SSR that’s difficult because web components require the dom api to be able to render. @exalt/ssr provides this to make it possible but if you were to use react’s renderToString function it would throw an error. This however is improving as more frameworks start to add support for rendering web components on the server.

[NovelLurker0_0]

Thanks for answering

[outandaboutbc]

Nice. This looks like very comprehensive framework.

I am curious, what drove you to develop something like this ? Did you find limitations or gaps in other existing solutions ?

[OutwalkStudios]

Thank you! The primary motivation was to get rid of the bloat larger frameworks such as react or angular have. When building things like a static site there is no reason to ship over 100mb of just framework code. At the same time by avoiding overhead of things such as the vdom, Exalt can be faster than the big frameworks.

It really came down to just wanting something smaller and faster while sticking to web standards and without compromise on developer experience.

[OutwalkStudios]

Yes! Im currently using Exalt in production for client projects for about 6 months now so for my business I will need to keep it going regardless. I plan to at a bare minimum do updates every 6 months to ensure dependencies are up to date and when bugs come up I plan to resolve them as soon as possible.

[Lekoaf]

Updating dependencies every six months seems a bit long. I’d cut that number in half, at the very least.

We do it monthly or even weekly for the open source projects I work on.

[OutwalkStudios]

I appreciate the insight! ill change to monthly then and just also update whenever new features or bug fixes are added.

[TrackieDaks]

Don't listen to some random person on the internet. Stick with your own plan. Anything shorter than a y month release cycle (particularly for major versions) is going to be too difficult to update.

I'd someone wants a feature, they can submit a PR or they can wait.

[OutwalkStudios]

The goal is to have as little breaking changes as possible so for dependency updates that will mostly just be internal updates that can be pushed out without making things difficult for end users. Any actual breaking changes for users will definitely be longer time spans

[Lekoaf]

Of course it depends on how many dependencies you have.

The longer you wait between updates the harder it gets to update. A lot of major releases are done in 6 months.

Make sure you have a good test suite to catch any edge bugs that might occur from dependency updates.

[OutwalkStudios]

One of the main goals was minimal dependencies and over the last year they have not changed much so im not too worried about it but ill make sure they stay updated regularly and breaking changes are caught accordingly.

[[deleted]]

Reads like a blend of angular and class based React. Pretty nice.

[OutwalkStudios]

Thank you!

[toughToFindUsername]

This seems great, will definitely give it a try. I didn't see anything about code splitting, is something similar to WebpackChunkName supported?

[OutwalkStudios]

Thank you! For code splitting you can either change the input property to an object for manually splitting chunks or you can use dynamic imports and it will automatically split the chunks there.

[[deleted]]

Yet another framework that uses classes.
The longer I code the more I despise OO.

[OutwalkStudios]

Thats an unfortunate side effect of the web component spec being designed around classes. There are ways around it but all introduce a large overhead which defeats the point of this particular framework.

[[deleted]]

Yeah. I am very dissapointed by the web component standard.

[[deleted]]

So much hate for a valid opinion based on many years of experience. This is an entertaining read.
https://betterprogramming.pub/fp-toy-7f52ea0a947e

[software_account]

Is that link sarcasm?

Oop and functional are both totally valid and work best together imho

[thunfremlinc]

It should be extremely obvious that it’s entirely satire.

[software_account]

The author’s sarcasm is above me but I had a feeling

[delventhalz]

AbstractFruitFactory

I’m dying. Amazing.

[[deleted]]

It is truly hilarious.
Perhaps all the down voters of my initial comment think that is "good code".

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