Design, develop and manage a catalog of Web Components

A presentation at NantesJS in January 2021 in by Horacio Gonzalez

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Design, develop and manage a catalog of Web Components Horacio Gonzalez 2021-01-21

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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 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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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

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Custom Element

<body> … <script> window.customElements.define(‘my-element’, class extends HTMLElement {…}); </script> <my-element></my-element> </body>

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Shadow DOM <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 <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… ● ● ● ●

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So, what are Design Systems? And why should I look at them?

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A talk for devs by a dev I am not a designer, neither I play one on TV…

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The same or different?

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Style Guides A document listing the styles, patterns, practices, and principles of a brand design standards

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Style Guides Style guides define the application’s look and feel

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Style Guide Example: Uber https://brand.uber.com/

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Style Guide Example: Medium https://www.behance.net/gallery/7226653/Medium-Brand-Development

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Style Guides alone are ambiguous Interpretation needed to adapt the preconisation to the use case

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Component Catalogs A component catalog is a repository of components, with one or several implementations, code examples and technical documentation

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Component Catalog example: Bootstrap https://getbootstrap.com/

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Component Catalog Example: ING’s Lion https://lion-web-components.netlify.app/

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Catalogs alone create inconsistency Like using the same LEGO bricks to create very different objects

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Design Systems A Design System is like a common visual language for product teams

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Design systems A Design System is a set of design standards, documentations, and principles, alongside with the toolkit (UI patterns and code components) to achieve those standards

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Design systems

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Example: Carbon Design System https://www.carbondesignsystem.com/

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Example: Firefox’s Photon Design System https://design.firefox.com/photon/

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Example: Material Design https://material.io/

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The component catalog The poor relative of the Design System family

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Let’s choose a simple example Bootstrap based component catalogs

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A long time ago Components defined in HTML, CSS and some jQuery

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Then it was AngularJS time… And new reference implementations were needed

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But you know the sad story… All UI Bootstrap based catalogs woke up with an obsolete implementation

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Worry no more, let’s do Angular! ng-bootstrap to the rescue

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But times had changed… In 2017 Angular is only one more in the clique

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TM React is the new Big Thing So let’s build React Bootstrap…

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Wait, what about Vue? We also need BootstrapVue

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OK, I think you see my point…

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Most Design System do a choice Either they choose a canonical implementation or they ship and maintain several implementations

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Both choices are problematic Shipping only one implementation: Web dev ecosystem changes quickly and almost nobody keeps the same framework for years…

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Both choices are problematic Shipping several implementations: You need to maintain all the implementation… and you still miss some others

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Incomplete catalogs are problematic People will need to recode the components in their chosen framework… Coherence is not guaranteed!!!

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Example: Carbon Design System

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Web Components & Design Systems A match made in heaven

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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 the interoperable alternative Any framework… or no framework at all

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They are truly everywhere 🚀 🚀 Even in the spaaaaaaaace 🚀

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You can have a single implementation And it simply works everywhere

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When you need interoperability Nothing beats the standard

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But how to do it? Designing, developing and managing a catalog of Web Components

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Learning from the best https://lion-web-components.netlify.app/

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Learning from the best https://github.com/CleverCloud/clever-components

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What kind of components? From little atomic blocs to big smart components, and everything in between

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A matter of size and complexity What kind(s) of components you want to build

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Build from the bottom and go up Eat your own dog food

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And how to choose the atoms? Flexibility and configurability are key

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And how to choose the atoms? Encode often used patterns

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And what about the molecules? Capitalize on your atoms Keep the flexibility and configurability

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Big smart business components Encoding your business logic

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Internal or external customers? Who are your target users?

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Internal customers need off-the-shelf components A well defined and coherent look-and-feel

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External customers need to be able to tweak Theming and customizing components

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How to organize the catalog Packages, imports and pragmatism

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A single repository Single source of truth for the catalog

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Two schools of thought A packet per component or a global one

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Two schools of thought Individual versioning vs global one

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Lots of web components libraries LitElement SkateJS For different needs and sensibilities

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Which ones to use? All are good, but these are popular favorites

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Driving-up adoption Making devs use your components

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Think who are your target users Users of any framework current or future…

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They aren’t used to your library And they shouldn’t need to be

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Go the extra mile to drive up adoption So they don’t need to do it

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Make it easy to use As easy as a HTML tag

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Document every composant How to use, inputs/outputs, examples…

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Documentation isn’t enough Storybook make adoption easy

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Keeping a coherent writing style Write down your guidelines

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I18n shouldn’t be an afterthought Prepare everything for internationalization

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That’s all, folks! Thank you all!