WinJS: The Windows Library for JavaScript

Here's a code snippet from the website:

    <div class="listView win-selectionstylefilled"
         data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView"
         data-win-options="{
                    itemDataSource: Sample.ListView.data.dataSource,
                    itemTemplate: select('.smallListIconTextTemplate'),
                    header: select('.header'),
                    selectionMode: 'none',
                    tapBehavior: 'none',
                    layout: { type: WinJS.UI.ListLayout }
            }">
    </div>

The ListView control looks quite powerful, but unfortunately that power comes at the cost of learning a new templating language and all its quirks. Where is the `select` method defined? Is it user accessible Javascript, or is it hidden deep inside the library? What if I wanted to capitalize my headers - would `data-win-options` evaluate Javascript? If it does, what is its binding? Does it use a custom expression parser? If so, what are its quirks? How do I create a reusable component out of this? How would I parameterize it?

There are a few custom tags here: 'data-win-control', 'data-win-options' and 'data-win-bind'. How many others are there, and how much time would I have to spend in their API docs to grok them?

Having worked with ERB, HAML, and Angular extensively, and after dabbling with Mustache, and thus relearning a different way to do the same thing over and over, it has become apparent to me that templating languages ought to do string interpolation and stop at that and leave the programming part to a programming language.

The thing they are doing in 10 where you can publish a regular website in the store is pretty cool, though.

You include some js and a manifest and your site detects if it's running in a store container and gives you access to the device...camera, disk, tpm. That's pretty cool.

I wonder how secure something like that can ever be...but its a neat idea.

Why do so many links on HN to new tech go to a page that doesn't fundamentally explain what it is right at the top?

What is this? Is it a way to access the windows api from javascript? Is it a library of web UI components like Telerik?

So many projects seem to suffer from this same problem, just say what you are doing in clear unambiguous short sentences right at the top with an example or a picture and the world would be a much better place.

what i would have loved 10 years ago was a jquery for windows, $('#32770').find('OK').click().. not sure if thats relevant still

anyway on win JS, have an upvote, but my advice is to stop extending html into some javascript/xml hybrid.

i think a functional approach there would be really sweet

    <div data-ref="listview1">
      <button>1</button>
      <button>2</button>
      ........
    </div>
    
    winJS('listview1').all('button').onclick(dostuff)
    

lets extract the logic from the view, so its way more easy to maintain than

    <div class="button-well">
                <button data-win-bind="onclick: changeSelectionMode">ReadOnly</button>
                <button data-win-bind="onclick: changeSelectionMode">Single</button>
                <button data-win-bind="onclick: changeSelectionMode">Extended</button>
                <button data-win-bind="onclick: changeSelectionMode">Multi</button>
            </div>

also when you create a control on the fly you can see the difference in keystrokes:

     $('body').append('<button>').onclick(dostuff)
     //versus
     body.innerHTML += '<button data-win-bind="onclick: changeslelectionmode">'; initBinds();

can you actually make native controls in win10 or windows mobile with this? that would be really cool also.

I went to the 'try it out' page here http://try.buildwinjs.com/#listviewinteractions

and noticed a ton of jank while scrolling. A quick look at chrome's timeline reveals a nasty listener leak. Hopefully, it's user error and not a flaw in the library.

Gah. I thought this was a library to do Automation in Windows using Javascript. That would have been a dream compared to what the Windows ecosystem currently has.

Autohotkey et.al are impressive in terms of functionality, but holy hell is the syntax and structure awful.

Cool, I guess. I'm not sure I see any point in writing native windows apps in Javascript when you've got a much better language in C#.

Kind of lame how you can't use any of this, or even open it in Visual Studio, unless you have Windows 8.1 installed.