Are Web Components the Betamax of web development?

A presentation at DevFest Poland in October 2020 in Warsaw, Poland by Horacio Gonzalez

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Are Web Components the Betamax of web development? Horacio Gonzalez @LostInBrittany

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Who are we? Introducing myself and introducing OVH OVHcloud

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Horacio Gonzalez @LostInBrittany Spaniard lost in Brittany, developer, dreamer and all-around geek Flutter

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OVHcloud: A global leader Web Cloud & Telcom 30 Data Centers in 12 locations 1 Million+ Servers produced since 1999 Private Cloud 34 Points of Presence on a 20 TBPS Bandwidth Network 1.5 Million Customers across 132 countries Public Cloud 2200 Employees worldwide 3.8 Million Websites hosting Storage 115K Private Cloud VMS running 1.5 Billion Euros Invested since 2016 300K Public Cloud instances running P.U.E. 1.09 Energy efficiency indicator 380K Physical Servers running in our data centers 20 Years in Business Disrupting since 1999 Network & Security

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OVHcloud & Poland ● Klaba family comes from Poland ● OVHcloud data center in Warsaw ● OVHcloud office in Wroclaw

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Sometimes I feel a bit grumpy The stories of the grumpy old speaker…

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On Web Components tour since 2014

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Image: bu.edu Web components == Revolution

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Images: BitRebels & Brickset Building a world brick by brick

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Is the promise unfulfilled? It’s 2019 now, where is your revolution, dude?

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And, even worse, several months ago Hey, dude, your Web Components thing is like Betamax Even if it was a better solution, market has already chosen, React has won, as VHS did…

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The 3 minutes context What the heck are web component?

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Web Components Web standard W3C

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Web Components Available in all modern browsers: Firefox, Safari, Chrome

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Web Components Create your own HTML tags Encapsulating look and behavior

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Web Components Fully interoperable With other web components, with any framework

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Web Components CUSTOM ELEMENTS SHADOW DOM TEMPLATES

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Custom Element To define your own HTML tag <body> … <script> window.customElements.define(‘my-element’, class extends HTMLElement {…}); </script> <my-element></my-element> </body>

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Shadow DOM To encapsulate subtree and style in an element <button>Hello, world!</button> <script> var host = document.querySelector(‘button’); const shadowRoot = host.attachShadow({mode:’open’}); shadowRoot.textContent = ‘こんにちは、影の世界!’; </script>

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Template To have clonable document template <template id=”mytemplate”> <img src=”” alt=”great image”> <div class=”comment”></div> </template> var t = document.querySelector(‘#mytemplate’); // Populate the src at runtime. t.content.querySelector(‘img’).src = ‘logo.png’; var clone = document.importNode(t.content, true); document.body.appendChild(clone);

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But in fact, it’s just an element… ● ● ● ● Attributes Properties Methods Events

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Hey, old man, WTF is a Betamax? A videocassette guide for Millenials

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At the beginning there was the TV And public saw it was good…

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But how to keep your favorite show forever? Sony VTR CV-2000 - Image credit LabGuy’s World The VTR was born, somewhere in the 1960s

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From videotape to videocassette… Sony U-matic - Image credit MKH Electronics U-matic cassette - Image credit PSAP And then to mass market, sometime in the 1970s

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Each vendor proposed their solution Sony’s Betamax - Image credit PSAP JVC’s VHS - Image credit PSAP Cassettes aren’t so different from JS frameworks after all…

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There was a format war So fierce that it has its own Wikipedia page

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Betamax was a superior format Higher quality recorders, better resolution, slightly superior sound, and more stable image

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But the market decided otherwise And Betamax, even if superior, failed…

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As usual, the winner took it all Until a new arrival entered in scene, the DVD… But that’s another story for another talk

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Why did Betamax failed? Spoiler: it isn’t so simple…

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Betamax was believed to be superior In the minds of the public and press

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But consumers wanted an affordable VCR Betamax costed hundreds of dollars more

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They also wanted to record a full movie Originally Betamax cassettes only recorded 1 hour

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And compatibility weighted on VHS side Many licencees offered VHS VCRs

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Are Web Components like Betamax? A perceived superior alternative destined to fail?

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It could be even the opposite… Web components are maybe the VHS of JS

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Compatibility is on Web Components side Web Components everywhere, baby!

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Do you remember AngularJS? And all the code put in the trash bin when Angular arrived…

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The pain of switching frameworks? Rewriting once again your code…

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The impossibility of sharing UI code? Between apps written with different frameworks

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Web Components change that In a clean and standard way

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They are indeed a revolution But it’s a silent one…

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They are there, in everyday sites More than you can imagine

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The components architecture won Components, components everywhere

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Web components ARE platform Truly part of the platform…

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Aren’t the multiple Web Components libs a sign of failure? If the standard worked, people would use Vanilla, wouldn’t them?

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Web component standard is low level At it should be!

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Standard == basic bricks Standard exposes an API to: ○ Define elements ○ Encapsulate DOM

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Libraries are helpers They give you higher-level primitives

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Different high-level primitives Each one tailored to a use

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Sharing the same base High-performant, low-level, in-the-platform web components standard

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Libraries aren’t a failure of standard They happen by design

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Stencil Powering Ionic 4+

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Not another library A Web Component toolchain

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A mature technology Ionic 4 released on year ago, powered by Stencil!

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Built by the Ionic team Tired of putting good code in the trash bin…

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A build time tool To generate standard web components

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Fully featured ● Web Component-based ● Component pre-rendering ● Asynchronous rendering pipeline ● Simple component lazy-loading ● TypeScript support ● JSX support ● One-way Data Binding ● Dependency-free components

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And the cherry on the cake Server-Side Rendering

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Stencil leverages the web platform Working with the web, not against it

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Polymer Is the old player still alive?

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Polymer evolved again in 2018 Image: © Nintendo Polymer 3 was here!

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What’s Polymer status today? Well, how could I say… it’s complicated

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It seems it’s going to be deprecated… Technically yes… and that means good news!

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Let’s try to see clearer Let’s dive into Polymer history…

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A tool built for another paradigm No web component support on browsers No React, Angular or Vue innovations

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No so well suited for the current one The current platform is way more powerful The state of art has evolved

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Let’s learn from its lessons The current platform is way more powerful The state of art has evolved

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And let it rest… There will have no Polymer 4…

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So Polymer as we know it is dead… But the Polymer Project is indeed alive!

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But I have invested so much on it! What to do?

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That’s why web components are top You can keep using all your Polymer components and create the new ones with a new library… And it simply works!

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And without metaphors? Polymer Project != Polymer library Polymer Project well alive Polymer library was only one library

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LitElement New kid on the block

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Born from the Polymer team For the new web paradigm

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Modern lightweight web components For the new web paradigm

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Based on lit-html An efficient, expressive, extensible HTML templating library for JavaScript

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Do you know tagged templates? function uppercaseExpression(strings, …expressionValues) { var finalString = ” for ( let i = 0; i < strings.length; i++ ) { if (i > 0) { finalString += expressionValues[i - 1].toUpperCase() } finalString += strings[i] } return finalString } const expressions = [ ‘Milan’, ‘Codemotion Milan’, ‘Thank you’]; console.log( uppercaseExpressionI am so happy to be in ${expressions[0]} for ${expressions[1]} ! ${expressions[2]}, ${expressions[1]}! ) Little known functionality of template literals

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lit-html Templates let myTemplate = (data) => html<h1>${data.title}</h1> <p>${data.body}</p>; Lazily rendered Generates a TemplateResult

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It’s a bit like JSX, isn’t it? The good sides of JSX… but in the standard!

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LitElement import { LitElement, html } from ‘lit-element’; // Create your custom component class CustomGreeting extends LitElement { // Declare properties static get properties() { return { name: { type: String } }; } // Initialize properties constructor() { super(); this.name = ‘World’; } // Define a template render() { return html<p>Hello, ${this.name}!</p>; } } // Register the element with the browser customElements.define(‘custom-greeting’, CustomGreeting); Lightweight web-components using lit-html