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
Another WebAssembly Frontend Framework for Rust :nerd_face: Seed is a frontend Rust framework for creating fast and reliable web apps w...
New
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
Simple.css is a classless CSS template that allows you to make a good looking website really quickly. By classless I mean that there are...
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
Flame is a fast & simple framework inspired by the Elm architecture for building web applications in PureScript
New
magarrent
Welcome to @actionforms_io :rocket: No code - No backend Form sender for developers Send your without a backend Join now: https://www...
New
First poster: bot
RacketScript is an experimental lightweight Racket to JavaScript (ECMAScript 6) compiler. RacketScript aims to leverage both JavaScript a...
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
CommunityNews
Announcing Parcel CSS: A new CSS parser, compiler, and minifier written in Rust!. I’m very excited to announce @parcel/css, a new CSS pa...
New

Other popular topics Top

DevotionGeo
I know that these benchmarks might not be the exact picture of real-world scenario, but still I expect a Rust web framework performing a ...
New
New
New
AstonJ
Inspired by this post from @Carter, which languages, frameworks or other tech or tools do you think is killing it right now? :upside_down...
New
Margaret
Hello everyone! This thread is to tell you about what authors from The Pragmatic Bookshelf are writing on Medium.
1147 28379 760
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
AstonJ
Saw this on TikTok of all places! :lol: Anyone heard of them before? Lite:
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
PragmaticBookshelf
Explore the power of Ash Framework by modeling and building the domain for a real-world web application. Rebecca Le @sevenseacat and ...
New
NewsBot
Node.js v22.14.0 has been released. Link: Release 2025-02-11, Version 22.14.0 'Jod' (LTS), @aduh95 · nodejs/node · GitHub
New