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

AstonJ
Yew looks really interesting!! What is Yew? Yew is a modern Rust framework for creating multi-threaded front-end web apps with WebAssem...
New
vLev
As a 16y/o with enormous amounts of time during quarantine, I decided to learn neural networks. To further understand the concept, I deci...
New
First poster: bot
Kaboom!!. a fun JavaScript game programming library &amp; environment https://replit.com/kaboom This thread was posted by one of our ...
New
First poster: bot
Explore DOM Events. Learn how the DOM Event system works through exploration
New
First poster: bot
Flame is a fast & simple framework inspired by the Elm architecture for building web applications in PureScript
New
First poster: AstonJ
Try it here: https://david.li/paint/ This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.
New
First poster: bot
This release represents a huge improvement for elm-pages in terms of features, developer experience, and performance. It introduces a com...
New
First poster: bot
Capacitor: Cross-platform native runtime for web apps. Build iOS, Android, and Progressive Web Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript
New
First poster: bot
Pablo is a small, open-source JavaScript library for SVG, the web standard for vector graphics. It can be used for vector-based art, game...
New
First poster: joeb
Bun is a fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime. Bundle, transpile, install and run JavaScript &amp; TypeScript projects – all in Bun. Bun ...
/js
New

Other popular topics Top

AstonJ
poll poll Be sure to check out @Dusty’s article posted here: An Introduction to Alternative Keyboard Layouts It’s one of the best write-...
New
AstonJ
We have a thread about the keyboards we have, but what about nice keyboards we come across that we want? If you have seen any that look n...
New
New
AstonJ
This looks like a stunning keycap set :orange_heart: A LEGENDARY KEYBOARD LIVES ON When you bought an Apple Macintosh computer in the e...
New
Margaret
Hello everyone! This thread is to tell you about what authors from The Pragmatic Bookshelf are writing on Medium.
1147 29994 760
New
Maartz
Hi folks, I don’t know if I saw this here but, here’s a new programming language, called Roc Reminds me a bit of Elm and thus Haskell. ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rails 7 completely redefines what it means to produce fantastic user experiences and provides a way to achieve all the benefits of single...
New
husaindevelop
Inside our android webview app, we are trying to paste the copied content from another app eg (notes) using navigator.clipboard.readtext ...
New
hilfordjames
There appears to have been an update that has changed the terminology for what has previously been known as the Taskbar Overflow - this h...
New
New