Show HN: CalDOM: An agnostic, reactive and minimalist JavaScript UI library

I decided to make my own mini jQuery years ago because I wanted a lightweight library. Also, I wanted to stay close to the native DOM API & vanilla JavaScript. Looking back, it paid really well. Then React & Vue JS happened.

In my opinion, the reactive UI approach bought a huge productivity improvement from the perspective of the developer. Also, it enabled a lot of beginner developers to navigate the programming landscape more easily.

However, this shift also moved people away from the core stuff that’s happening under the hood. As a result, sometimes we have to struggle a lot to find solutions within the library’s limits, which are sometimes hilariously dead simple & performant to implement with native APIs.

CalDOM tries to solve this by being 100% interoperable with the native DOM. I hope this will be helpful for developers with similar requirements.

Instead of pulling you into a library-specific magical world, CalDOM let you fully access the DOM directly while keeping the reactivity. A 2-in-1 virtual-DOM & no-virtual-DOM approach if you will.

So you could take full advantage of native APIs & mix it with other libraries to gain superior performance & flexibility in the development process.

CalDOM does not require any dependency or tooling. It does not introduce any new syntax. Just pure JS.

This is the first time I’m publishing something like this. This was a simple jQuery alternative I made myself years ago & kept on improving it slowly. Worked really hard during the last few months to add reactivity and get it to this level.

Please check it out & let me know what you think, the good, bad & your suggestions to improve it.

Also, it's great if you could contribute to the project: https://github.com/dumijay/CalDom

Are Caldom instances itself always synced with the DOM? e.g. If I create a Caldom instance for all ‘button’ and add an event handler for ‘click’. Now another piece of JavaScript adds a button to the page, will the event handler also trigger for that button or just the buttons when I first instantiated Caldom?

Source: https://twitter.com/_developit/status/1412451442946981890

I highly recommend React/Vue folks to check it out, it's literally 2x'd my productivity and completely obliterated the mental RAM i had to keep in order to "think in react"

I'm assuming state is a proxy and you're using the single threaded nature of JS to make render functions dependent on accessed variables?

These new “super lightweight frameworks” are only 3kb and as fast as vanilla js because they really don’t do much...

They always end up getting in the way though one way or another.

Writing a state and updating the DOM when the state changes really isn’t complicated at all.

People who don’t know how to do it need vanilla js template projects, not frameworks...

In Sciter DOM and vDOM are equally honored.

This CalDOM's (DOM + vDOM population):

    _("#output-1")
      .append(
        _("+h1").text("Hello World!")
      );

    document.$("#output-1")
      .append(<h1>Hello World!</h1>)

    let app = _().react(
        {},
        {
            render: state =>
                _( "+h1", `Hello ${state.name}` ) //This is XSS safe
        }
    )

    _("#output-2", app );

    //Edit below line to update state
    app.state.name = "World Reactively ";

    class App extends Element {
       name = "unknown";
       render() {
         return <body><h1>Hello { this.name }</h1></body>;
       }
    }

    document.body.patch(<App />);

    document.body.componentUpdate({name:"World Reactively "}); // will invoke render()