mafinar

mafinar

Just tried Surface component library for LiveView and it's amazing

Wanted to try out Surface for awhile now and yesterday finally had the time for it, the developer experience is amazing and I decided to convert the project (a small one) to Surface. I would like to know if any of you have any experience with it or if there’s anything I’d look out for.

If anyone’s interested in the project, it’s here (It’s a Covid19 dashboard based on (soon to be pluggable) John Hopkins Dataset.

Most Liked

mafinar

mafinar

I demoed it on ElixirTO last month, the video just got uploaded, here is the link on it.

mafinar

mafinar

asdf is fun!

So the experience is very good. I had ~12 components and 2 live views written in plain LV and took around 2 hours convert 5 of them to Surface until I hit a bit of a block with passing Jason encoded data for the Leaflet Map hook to consume. I realized it’s probably a bug, reported it and went to sleep, only to see it fixed upon waking up, and completed the transformation without any hiccups. My muscle memory is much more attuned to this syntax as opposed to LV one (after all, it IS a wrapper so it’s meant to be friendlier ;)).

Now for the things I loved about it:

  • Syntax is reminiscent of Vue, did not have to stress much to understand how to do what.
  • The distinction between LiveView, LiveComponent and Component is nice and explicit
  • Awesome declarative is awesome! I get warnings and errors on mismatched prop types (for some of the types at least). I even get warnings if I feed something to a component I did not declare (i.e. id in a Surface.Component (stateless) and not declaring it).
  • Event handling niceties. Events are types too, declarable! Not remembering to @myself was convenient for me. Also :on-click is more intuitive than phx-click (on any other even).
  • The IDE integration is surprisingly good (I was expecting worse) and there is a to do list on it I look forward too
  • There is a Context
  • For me, <Hello name={{ @name }} /> is better than <%= live_component @socket, Hello, name: @name %> and <tr :for={{ row <- rows}}></tr> is better than <tr><%= for row <- rows %>{}<% end %></tr>
  • Bulma for examples! So there was this great minds think alike effect

I am still working with it as I type this (which explains the lengthy reply), I cheated on some of the components with :any as prop/data type so am fixing those and thinking of converting some of the form and input elements with Surface components. I hope to make the codebase look prettier by tomorrow and then move back to the backend. If you try it out and have any suggestions please reach out!

Carter

Carter

Looks v.cool Mafinar…but could you upload a demo to Heroku for those of us who dont have elixir dev environments pls?

Where Next?

Popular Frontend topics Top

wolf4earth
I’m currently in the process of rebuilding my personal website/blog from scratch. At the moment my website is using hugo, and while I thi...
New
New
AstonJ
Another WebAssembly Frontend Framework for Rust :nerd_face: Seed is a frontend Rust framework for creating fast and reliable web apps w...
New
New
First poster: bot
SixtyFPS is a toolkit to efficiently develop fluid graphical user interfaces for any display: embedded devices and desktop applications. ...
New
First poster: bot
Open source CSS framework for data visualization. Contribute to ChartsCSS/charts.css development by creating an account on GitHub. ...
New
First poster: bot
Explore DOM Events. Learn how the DOM Event system works through exploration
New
First poster: bot
Solid stands on the shoulders of giants, particularly React and Knockout. If you’ve developed with React Hooks before, Solid should seem ...
New
spunny
Hi, We have existing ASP.NET (not core) application. My colleague added a page to this using jquery, knockout and checkeditor and talkin...
New
NKTgLaw
The NKTg Law (Law of Variable Inertia) introduces a new way to treat inertia not only as a theoretical physics concept but as quantifiabl...
New

Other popular topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Rust is an exciting new programming language combining the power of C with memory safety, fearless concurrency, and productivity boosters...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build highly interactive applications without ever leaving Elixir, the way the experts do. Let LiveView take care of performance, scalabi...
New
DevotionGeo
The V Programming Language Simple language for building maintainable programs V is already mentioned couple of times in the forum, but I...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Create efficient, elegant software tests in pytest, Python's most powerful testing framework. Brian Okken @brianokken Edited by Kat...
New
rustkas
Intensively researching Erlang books and additional resources on it, I have found that the topic of using Regular Expressions is either c...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Use WebRTC to build web applications that stream media and data in real time directly from one user to another, all in the browser. ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight Mike Riley @mriley This month, we turn the spotlight on Mike Riley, author of Portable Python Projects. Mike’s book ...
New
sir.laksmana_wenk
I’m able to do the “artistic” part of game-development; character designing/modeling, music, environment modeling, etc. However, I don’t...
New
AstonJ
This is cool! DEEPSEEK-V3 ON M4 MAC: BLAZING FAST INFERENCE ON APPLE SILICON We just witnessed something incredible: the largest open-s...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Use advanced functional programming principles, practical Domain-Driven Design techniques, and production-ready Elixir code to build scal...
New