Wir stellen vor: Oats~i - Das Open Web Framework

Ich bin jetzt seit etwa fünf Jahren ein aktiver Webentwickler. Als ich Ende 2019 offiziell mit der Webentwicklung begann, war ich von einem riesigen Ökosystem an Webentwicklungstools umgeben, die ich nutzen konnte, um Websites für Kunden und jedes persönliche Projekt zu erstellen, das ich hatte.

Aber ich habe mich für den Do-it-yourself-Weg entschieden. Nicht, weil ich Schmerzen und Momente des Kopfkratzens gewohnt bin, sondern weil ich die Webentwicklung von Grund auf erlernen und nicht direkt in ein Framework springen und mein Wissen von dort aus aufbauen wollte.

Außerdem raten die meisten erfahrenen Webentwickler dazu. Das Erlernen von HTML, CSS und Vanilla-JavaScript und alles andere darüber hinaus wird (irgendwie) ein Kinderspiel sein.

Nun, hier sind wir, fünf Jahre später, und irgendwie habe ich schließlich mein eigenes Web-Framework erstellt. Was als einfache Übung zum Erlernen der Funktionsweise des Webs und der Web-APIs begann, entwickelte sich schließlich zu einem umfassenden Projekt mit unzähligen Kopfzerbrechen, Enttäuschungen und Heureka.

Wir stellen Ihnen Oats~i vor, das offene Web-Framework, das Sie auch zurück zu den Grundlagen führt. Oats~i bietet eine Struktur, mit der Sie Webanwendungen mit HTML, CSS und Vanilla-JavaScript erstellen können, mit leistungsstarker Erweiterbarkeit, serverseitigem Rendering, zustimmungsbasiertem Routing, Reaktivität über einen Datenmanager, Ansichtsmanager und Hooks, ein Fragment -basiertes Ansichtssystem, Ansichtsfelder zur Unterstützung zusätzlicher Layouts, Popups und benutzerdefinierter Ansichten über Fragmenten, Unterstützung für „native“ Webbrowserfunktionen wie Parameter, Abfragen und Ziele, Paginierung, Codeaufteilung und Lazy Loading für JavaScript und Pakete ansehen.

All dies ist nativ im Framework enthalten und läuft auf Webpack als bevorzugtem Modul-Bundler.

Oats~i kümmert sich nicht um Ihre Serverumgebung, da es sich um ein rein clientseitiges System handelt. Da auf dem Server kein JS ausgeführt wird, ist keine spezielle Servereinrichtung erforderlich, um eine Oats~i-App bereitzustellen.

Aber bevor wir ins Detail gehen, wo läuft es jetzt?

Hier: https://www.vertesolutions.com

Dieser Standort ist ein Produktionsstandort für einen Kunden, der im Bereich Umweltberatung und Öko-Geschäft tätig ist. Das Unternehmen heißt Verte Environmental Solutions. Wenn ich also auf „Vertes Website“ verweise, ist das die Website, auf die ich mich beziehe.

Oats~i läuft derzeit an keinem anderen Ort.

BEARBEITEN: Der Quellcode ist ebenfalls öffentlich. https://github.com/Oats-i/Oats-i

Bevor ich an diesen Punkt gelangte, habe ich im Laufe der Jahre das Framework im Admin-Panel der Website (das maßgeschneidert ist) entwickelt, getestet, aktualisiert und neue Funktionen hinzugefügt. Wenn Sie also einiges von dem, worüber ich hier auf der Client-Site sprechen werde, verpassen, stellen Sie sicher, dass sie im Adminbereich ausgeführt werden.

Was ich außerdem vorstelle, ist ein ziemlich ausgefeiltes Framework mit ein paar Funktionen, über die es sich zu sprechen lohnt. Seien Sie also gewarnt, das wird ein langes Stück. Und ich habe versucht, es so weit wie möglich zu bearbeiten, um es kürzer zu machen. Allerdings habe ich mit diesem Intro den Kern des Ganzen angesprochen. Der Rest des Stücks ist ein Kratzen der Oberfläche, bevor wir in zukünftigen Beiträgen tiefer in die Tiefe gehen.

So, genug von diesem Intro.

Lassen Sie uns etwas tiefer in Oats~i eintauchen, so wie ich es bisher entwickelt habe, und schauen wir uns an, was es sofort bietet und was ich für die Zukunft plane.

Ein offenes Web-Framework

Wenn ich Oats~i als offenes Web-Framework bezeichne, meine ich, dass Oats~i ein einfaches, aber erweiterbares Framework ist, dessen Code in einfachem HTML und Vanilla-JavaScript geschrieben werden kann, wobei CSS natürlich das De-facto-Styling-Tool ist. Mit dieser einfachen Einrichtung können Sie Ihre eigenen Template-Engines, CSS-Bibliotheken und andere Tools von Drittanbietern oder benutzerdefinierten hinzufügen, sofern Webpack dies zulässt und Sie es konfigurieren können.

Fragmentbasiertes System

Oats~i arbeitet mit einem Build-System, das Fragmente als „Komponenten“ oder Kernstücke der Web-App erzeugt. Nehmen Sie zum Beispiel diese einfachen Ansichten:

Beide Bilder zeigen die „Root-Ansicht“ der App, also die Hauptansicht der App, die der Benutzer immer sehen wird. Dann werden die anderen Ansichten (Fragmente) dynamisch gerendert.

Die Stammansicht kann die primären Navigationslinks oder -schaltflächen sowie andere Ansichten enthalten, die der Benutzer immer in der App sieht und die sich normalerweise nicht ändern.

Der Rest der Ansichten innerhalb der Stammansicht ändert sich, und dies basiert darauf, dass Fragmente basierend auf dem Routing des Benutzers aus der App geladen und entladen werden. Fragmente durchlaufen einen Erstellungsprozess, der in erster Linie die zu rendernde Ansicht abruft, sie im übergeordneten Zielknoten platziert und es Ihnen dann ermöglicht, den Rest Ihrer App und Geschäftslogik zu verbinden.

Ein Oats~i-Build-Prozess löst normalerweise die folgenden Kernmethoden in Ihrem Fragment aus:

//gets the view for your fragment
async initializeView(cb){
}

//triggers after the fragment view has been attached to the DOM
onUIBind(serverSideRendered){
}

//triggers after the fragment has completed building and anytime its rebuilt for the same route
async onQueryParamsDataUpdate(changedParams, data, savedState, routeParams, isServerSide){
}

Und das ist im Grunde alles.

Mit einer solchen Skelettstruktur haben Sie einige Flexibilitäten, wie zum Beispiel:

Einfaches HTML rendern oder komplexe Ansichten mit Templating-Engines (Ihrer Wahl) laden

Die erste Methode, die Sie überschreiben (initializeView()), kann wie folgt abgeschlossen werden:

async initializeView(cb){

  const viewAsString = `<p class="text">My view</p>`;
  this.onViewInitSuccess(viewAsString, cb);
}

Wir erhalten unsere Ansicht als HTML-String und übergeben sie an die interne Methode (onViewInitSuccess()), die auch den Rückruf entgegennimmt, der an die ursprüngliche Methode übergeben wird.

Der Aufruf von onViewInitSuccess() löst den Build-Prozess aus, um mit den nächsten Schritten fortzufahren.

HTML als String in JS zu schreiben ist einfach und Oats~i erlaubt es, kann aber oft problematisch werden. Anstatt jedoch eine neue Syntax oder ein neues System zum Schreiben von Ansichten für Oats~i zu erstellen, können Sie mit Oats~i die für Ihren Anwendungsfall am besten geeignete Template-Engine anschließen, sie in Ihrer Webpack-Konfiguration verknüpfen und sie ihre Wirkung entfalten lassen .

Im Fall von Verte verwende ich handlebars in Kombination mit handlebars-loader, um separate Ansichtsdateien im hbs-Format zu schreiben und sie einfach in meinem Code zu benötigen.

Also, statt

const viewAsString = `<p class="text">My view</p>`;

Meine Ansichten werden jetzt wie folgt bereitgestellt:

const viewAsString = require("./relative/path/to/view.hbs")(myTemplatingData);

Wenn ich stattdessen beispielsweise EJS verwenden möchte, muss ich nur meine Webpack-Konfiguration aktualisieren und die richtige Importsyntax für diesen Anwendungsfall verwenden.

Oats~i kümmert sich nur darum, dass die an ihn übergebene Ansicht ein HTML-String ist.

Ansichten zur Netzwerkbeschaffung

Oats~i ermöglicht Ihnen sogar, Ihre Ansichten über das Netzwerk einzuholen. Dies ist zum Teil der Grund, warum die Asynchronität in der Methode initializeView() vorhanden ist.

Oats~i erwartet außerdem, dass Sie in dieser Phase möglicherweise Netzwerkaufrufe tätigen, entweder für eine vollständige Ansicht basierend auf dem Benutzertyp oder anderen Faktoren oder um Vorlagendaten basierend auf Ihrer Ansicht und Geschäftslogik zu erhalten.

Was Sie hier tun, hängt völlig von Ihren geschäftlichen und technischen Gründen ab.

**HINWEIS: **Es gibt einen guten Grund, warum das Build-System nicht darauf wartet, dass Versprechen in der Build-Phase mit „await“ oder „then()“ aufgelöst werden, sondern stattdessen einen Rückruf verwendet, der an die relevanten Methoden übergeben wird. Das wird klar, wenn wir in einem späteren Artikel tiefer in die Funktionsweise von Oats~i eintauchen.

Vanilla JavaScript oder eine kompatible JS-Bibliothek für App oder Business Logic

Der Oats~i-Code ist in Vanilla-JavaScript, der „nativen“ Sprache, die Webbrowser verstehen. Es gibt jedoch einige Flexibilitäten, die Sie beim Schreiben Ihrer Geschäftslogik nutzen können.

Zum Beispiel können Sie jQuery aus irgendeinem Grund in Ihr Projekt portieren und es verwenden, um einen Teil Ihrer Logik zu schreiben. Ich habe dies tatsächlich vor langer Zeit getan, noch bevor Oats~i in seinem aktuellen Zustand erstellt wurde, um etwa fünf Zeilen Code für reibungslose Scrolleffekte auf der Website von Verte zu schreiben. (TLDR, ich war faul, über Stack Overflow hinauszudenken, lol).

Theoretisch können Sie Oats~i in einer TypeScript-Umgebung verwenden, müssen dies aber noch testen. Die einzige Verwendung, die ich für TypeScript hatte, war sein Typisierungssystem in Verbindung mit JSDocs, um Typen innerhalb des Frameworks zu dokumentieren, eine Methode, die ich vor einiger Zeit dokumentiert habe.

Informationen zur Integration von JSDocs und TypeScript für Tippzwecke ohne den Build-Prozess finden Sie hier.

Codeaufteilung und Lazy Loading

Webpack ist ein leistungsstarkes Webentwicklungstool, das äußerst komplexe Projektkonfigurationen ermöglicht und Entwicklungsteams die Flexibilität gibt, die sie benötigen, um ein Projekt entsprechend seiner einzigartigen Spezifikation zu erstellen.

Oats~i läuft auf Webpack, wobei das Framework hauptsächlich auf der Codeaufteilung und Lazy-Loading-Funktion von Webpack basiert, um asynchrone Fragmentblöcke und -bündel zu unterstützen.

Das bedeutet, dass Ihre Fragmente in einem Paket geladen oder mithilfe von Webpack in mehrere Blöcke aufgeteilt werden können, wodurch die anfängliche Ladegeschwindigkeit für Ihre Oats~i-Web-App optimiert wird. Kombinieren Sie dies mit Ansichten aus dem Netzwerk, wenn Ihre App diese benötigt, und es gibt mehrere Möglichkeiten, wie Sie Ihre App in Oats~i optimieren können, um die beste Benutzererfahrung in Bezug auf die Ladezeiten zu gewährleisten.

Erweiterte Projektkonfigurationen mit Webpack

Der vielleicht größte Vorteil des Webpacks als Basis für Oats~i ist die große Konfiguration, die Ihnen zur Verfügung steht und die es Ihnen ermöglicht, Ihre App nach Bedarf zu gestalten.

That's why you can set up templating engines that suit your view rendering process, configure babel and other loaders/plugins for your app, and simply build something that is fully-specced to your project's specifics.

Oats~i runs a simple base webpack configuration that sets up handlebars-loader, html-loader, css loader, asset loader, and HTMLWebpackPlugin to create your server-side views or templates. Using webpack-merge, you can extend these configurations and architect your web app as you want it.

This makes Oats~i works a lot like a plug-and-play system. It gives you a skeleton, and you can wrap and configure your app around it as you like.

Routing

Routing is a default feature in Oats~i. In fact, to run the app, you must provide routing information that the app will use to initialize itself and manage user navigation and fragment rendering.

A simple routing information looks like this:

Const MyRoutingInfos = [
  {
    route: "/my-route",
    target: myMainFragmentBuilder,
    nestedChildFragments: [
      myNestedChildFragmentBuilder
    ]
  }
]

When Oats~i loads from the server, it checks the current url and finds a match for it in the provided routing info. In Verte's case, when you load "/", Oats~i searches for the routing info with that that route as a match and then inflates the fragments in order from "target" to each nested child fragment.

You can also provide a default route that Oats~i will try to start the app from, unless the client had sourced the page from a valid route given in your routing info.

Params in Routing

Oats~i also supports the use of params in routes, using the colon syntax commonly used in express.

Therefore, a route defined like /:myParams is valid, and will map for routes such as /user-1, /user-2, /user-3.

Oats~i goes a step farther and parses these params for you.
When setting up your fragment, you have the option of setting up params it should watch out for. The name of the param should be an EXACT match to the name used in your routing info.

When building the fragment, Oats~i will parse the value, note any changes, and pass two arguments to your onQueryParamsDataUpdate() method. These are an object of all watched params that have changed, and the current value of all watched params.

Therefore, if you have a fragment that shows user information, defined under the route /:userID, and the client first navigates to /user-xyz, you'll be able to read the value of userID as user-xyz. If the client routes again and this time the route is /user-abc, you'll immediately know that the value of userID has changed to user-abc and you can respond appropriately.

Queries Support

Queries are also a core part of web browsing and urls. Oats~i also parses queries for you, as long as you tell the fragment to watch them, using their keys.

For instance, if your route /:userID maps to /user-3?promptUpgrade=true, and you specify in your fragment that you want to watch updates for the query with the key "promptUpgrade", these will be parsed and sent to the method onQueryParamsDataUpdate() as well.

However:

You cannot write routes in your routing info using queries. Only params are supported. Oats~i looks for the valid routing info for a given url after truncating any queries and targets. The parsing will be done afterwards.

Verte's website already uses this mechanism when rendering views for blog articles at the blog article page. The route for each article is parameterized and we only respond to a change in the watched param.

Consent-Based Routing

This is perhaps a very unique feature from Oats~i. Consent-based routing gives you power over the user experience, allowing you to warn users about navigating away from a crucial page in case there are any pending processes, all controlled in-app.

Instead of using the provided standard browser API that pops up a dialog box, Oats~i uses a mix of History API and state management to detect a pop or navigation, ask the current rendered fragments for consent, halt subsequent navigation attempts, and proceed only if the user grants it permission.

If the user chooses to remain in their current view, Oats~i restores the browser's navigation path to the original state.

Of course, having users click on "ok" every time they want to navigate around your app is a bad idea. So, by default, Oats~i fragments and view panels (more on these later) consent to a navigation attempt by default.

Verte internally uses this to safeguard the admin when curating blog content, in case the current draft has not yet been picked up by the autosave script within its time delta. In case the admin wants to navigate away from the blog editor and there are unsaved drafts, they'll get a warning through a dialog and choose to either continue navigating away or stay on the page and manually save their work.

Pop-Ups, Dialogs, and More Layouts Using View Panels

In Oats~i, the framework will primarily render a route through fragments. However, there's an extra utility called view panels that allows you to render other views that your fragment may need on the fly. These include dialog boxes, hamburger panels, or even loading screens with bespoke information that the user may need.

To spawn a view panel, you have to request for it through the view panels manager. Oats~i self manages views for fragments and view panels, meaning you never have to write logic to bind your primary fragment views to the DOM or remove them once a view panel or its associated fragment is being destroyed due to a change in navigation.

A view panel, spawned by a view panels manager is also automatically wired into the consent-routing process of the fragment, allowing you to extend fragment functionality.

View panels can also watch params and queries.

Route-Triggered and Direct-Triggered View Panels

View panels can be triggered either by route changes or directly via a call to the fragment's view panels manager. For the former, this is where having queries in your route and linking them to a view panel within the fragment can come in handy.

If you have a route "/:post-id" which is currently represented in the browser as "/nice-post?showComments=true", you can use a route-triggered view panel within the fragment to automatically pop a side panel that loads the post comments and allows the user to read through them.

This feature is typically accessible through the onQueryParamsDataUpdate() method. Calling super (in case you've overridden it) will invoke the fragment's view panels manager to attempt to render any route-triggered view panels.

The biggest advantage of this kind of setup is that your view panel's rendering and behavior is now tied to the navigation, making the user experience more natural.

So, given our example, if the user navigated to "/nice-post?showComments=true", read the comments, and pressed back, the route will change back to "/nice-post", the view panels manager will note this change, and automatically trigger the destruction process for the view panel as long as consent has been granted.

Just like fragments, view panels also grant consent by default. Therefore, you should override the consent method ONLY when necessary.

Reactivity and Data Management

A modern web framework is not complete without a good touch of reactivity and data management. And here's where perhaps the most crucial difference between Oats~i and other web frameworks comes in.

Oats~i doesn't automatically couple views to a piece of data or state.

Instead, this is left entirely to the developer to do it based on their app or business logic.

As is, you can use Oats~i to build a web app with multiple static pages rendered under fragments and view panels and end it at that. The app will just work. If you want to add data, network calls, and reactivity, the data manager utility covers everything, and only to the scope that you determine, without affecting any surrounding views or data.

Let's look at the data manager and its supporting utilities: the network interface and view managers.

The Data Manager

The data manager is an Oats~i utility that allows you to tie data, server-resources, and client views together. The data manager holds an array of models, a model being the core piece or type of data associated with a section of your app and its selected views.

Currently, I've designed it to take a model as an object with arrays nested within, as it's the most common format for passing data around client and server resources (as Json).

Therefore, a simple model can look something like this:

{
  my: string,
  simple: number,
  obj: {
    ofArrays: number[],
    objArrays: { objKey: string }[]
  }
}

The data manager works by scoping its model. This means that every bit of the model can be treated as a unit, creating a set of dot-separated keys that define a specific value or type in your data.

For instance, in the example above, the data manager will break down the model into the following scopes: "MODEL_ROOT | my | simple | obj | obj.ofArrays | obj.objArrays | obj.objArrays.array.objKey "

These scopes represent:

MODEL_ROOT -> {
  my: string,
  simple: number,
  obj: {
    ofArrays: number[],
    objArrays: { objKey: string }[]
  }
}

my -> string,

simple -> number

obj -> {
  ofArrays: number[],
  objArrays: { objKey: string }[]
}

obj.ofArrays -> number[]

obj.objArrays -> { objKey: string }[]

obj.objArrays.array.objKey -> string

You can treat these scopes as dot-separated paths to a distinct piece of data.

With these scopes, the data manager then gives you, the developer, fine-grained control of your data, allowing to assign a network interface or view manager(s) to any of these data.

Let's shallowly dive into what these two are.

Network Interface

In most apps (native or web), the data shown to the user is sourced from an outside resource, a server. Therefore, the internal model often needs an API interface that sits between itself and the external resource.

In Oats~i's case, the network interface will perform the CRUD operation you need in relation to the data held by the data manager and ensure both ends are in sync.

The network interface is defined as an object with three methods:

getReqBody()

This method gets the body of the request and other data such as method, address, headers, etc.

onDataLoadPostProcess()

Because the type of response data and the type of your internal model may vary, the network interface allows you to post-process the response and provide the final data in the data manager's model type.

onDataLoadError()

This method allows you to format the error response in case the network call fails.

Network Interface Scoping

API designs are varied, meaning, the addresses or routes used to make CRUD operations for a given piece of data can be different.

For instance, a social media app can have a different API for loading all posts, and each post running unique APIs to repost, like, or report the post.

Assuming such an architecture, using scoping within the data manager allows you to specify unique network interfaces for each scope.

For instance, you can have a network interface for the MODEL_ROOT network call (which will load the posts), "repost" network call, and any other call that can be scoped out of the structure of the model the data manager holds.

This gives you a whole unique way of viewing your data, breaking it down from one large resource with a common end point, to a collection of multiple data units that can be handled independently through the data manager.

A key thing to note here is that you can only have one network interface per scope, creating a single "endpoint" for every scoped piece of data in your model.

View Manager

Through the network interface, the data manager can now keep data in sync between its model and the server. Now what about displaying it to the user and, more importantly, showing them when it's changing?

That's where the view manager comes in.

View managers respond to mutations or changes happening to data held by the data manager, through a network operation or a direct in-app change.

Oats~i currently supports two types of view managers - a standard view manager and a list view manager.

A standard view manager is ideal for simple views with components that are not duplicated over a list. On the other hand, a list view manager is best for "complex" views with view components duplicated over a list.

Regardless of the type, a view manager will tell you of the following changes within a model or its scoped types:

onMutate()

This method fires when a data type of the scope is changing

onCommit()

This method fires when a mutation of the data type of the scope has been completed, thus committed

onCancel()

This method fires when a mutation of the data type of the scope has been cancelled

onError()

This method fires when a mutation of the data type of the scope has encountered an error, allowing you to retry

There's also the builder set of methods, which allow you to pass in a view (as a HTML string) inflated with your data. These methods also inform you of when the view has been attached or about to be detached, depending on the mutation.

These three methods are:

inflateRoot()

Gets the templated view as a string for the data provided

onViewAttach()

Calls when the view has been attached to the DOM

onViewDetach()

Calls when the view is about to be detached from the DOM
You can see the results of these interactions in the blog pages of Verte's website.

Using the combination of builder methods, root hooks, and component hooks, the data-driven dynamic views of the blog and blog article fragments can show loading animations when we're sourcing data from the network, show error messages in case of a failure, and populate the views once the new data from the network interface has been committed.

A view manager will also have component hooks which allow for even finer grained reactivity, with the elements of each view node.

For instance, using the model:

{
  my: string,
  simple: number,
  obj: {
    ofArrays: number[],
    objArrays: { objKey: string }[]
  }
}

And a view manager of the scope "MODEL_ROOT" (therefore the whole model), we can assume that the main view component showing the data of the MODEL_ROOT scope, has components within it that my show the specific data held in "my", "simple", "obj", or generally the child scopes of MODEL_ROOT.

Therefore, you can set up a component or element of your view to react to changes in these "child" values.

All these hook methods get a viewNode parameter passed to them by the view manager, so you always have a reference of which view node these data changes are associated with and query its components as you need.

However, you should not bother with removing these core view elements once they're no longer needed. The view manager handles that for you.

No Virtual DOM

Oats~i doesn't operate through a virtual DOM. Instead, the fragments, view panels, and view managers directly use the DOM APIs to insert or remove DOM elements.

After inserting your view component into the DOM, the view manager will provide you with its direct reference in the builder, root, and component hooks. Therefore, you can just directly add listeners, change attributes, or simply manipulate the DOM element using the direct DOM apis.

Lifecycle Management

A core bit of a complex web app is lifecycle management. Oats~i has its own lifecycle management process for fragments and view panels, whose functions are extended to other utilities such as the data manager, view managers, and remote request util (the actual utility the data manager uses in conjunction with the network interface to make network calls).

Therefore, straight off the bat, using Oats~i and its core utilities will have lifecycle automatically managed for you.

For instance, if you're using the data manager within a fragment to make a CRUD operation, and the user navigates away from the fragment, the data manager and remote request util will be able to cancel all network operations, skip updating view managers, and unregister them, because your fragment or view panel no longer exists.

Listening to Lifecycle Events

As an Oats~i developer, you can make use of a fragment or view panel's lifecycle management to create robust lifecycle-aware libraries that will work well in an Oats~i environment.

You just have to grab the lifecycle object using the internal method,

getLifeCycleObject()

and attach listeners to it. These listeners typically include four methods for:

onFragmentRunning()

Called when the fragment has been created and is running

onFragmentCancelled()

Called when the fragment's build has been cancelled

onFragmentDestroyed()

Called when the fragment has been destroyed

onViewReady()

Called when the fragment's view has been attached to DOM

*Note: *"Fragment" here also applies to view panels.

The main calls you need to watch out for are onFragmentRunning(), onViewReady(), and onFragmentDestroyed(). If your library adds functionality that is not UI-related, you can enable the library after getting the onFragmentRunning() call.

If the library manipulates views (such as an animation library), you can enable its functionality after receiving the onViewReady() call.
Once you get the onFragmentDestroyed() call, pack up, and stop everything.

OOP-Based Core

We have talk about a lot about some core features of Oats~i but we haven't talked about paradigm. How will you write core Oats~i code?

Well, Oats~i is an OOP-based web framework. That means most utilities are provided as classes. A fragment is created from an AppMainFragment or AppChildFragment class. The data manager is a class. View managers are classes and so on.

I chose OOP because of its reusability, garbage collection, and a much cleaner way of managing functions and processes within Oats~i.

For instance, no pun intended, having the fragment as a class allows Oats~i to do something clever. It never reconstructs the fragment class if it determines that its being reused. Instead, the build process just goes directly to firing onQueryParamsDataUpdate(), and doesn't re-render the fragment's main view or update that section of the DOM, since it's unnecessary.

Another advantage of doing this is that your fragment can retain part of its state amidst related route calls.

For instance, in Verte's case, when you're in the fragment that renders a blog article, clicking on another article under the "Other stories" list doesn't reconstruct the fragment. Instead, the original view is untouched, and only the dynamic, data-driven views, ran by the data manager in conjunction with the view manager, update based on the new param value obtained from onQueryParamsDataUpdate().

Exploiting Functional Programming

Just because the Oats~i core uses OOP, doesn't mean you're fully restricted to creating libraries that follow the OOP paradigm. Simply making them lifecycle aware is enough.

This will allow them to capture and free resources from the fragment as Oats~i renders and destroys them.

When porting Verte's client to Oats~i, I've used this exact strategy to reuse some functional scripts I'd written for the original webpages.

Therefore, I expect very few bottlenecks and paradigm strictness for developers seeking to use their functional scripts in an Oats~i project, as long as they're lifecycle aware.

Server-Side Rendering (Views and Data)

Finally, a big part of modern web frameworks - server-side rendering.
Oats~i natively supports server-side rendering, with no need for running JavaScript on the server.

Using HTMLWebpackPlugin, you can extract the views you use for each fragment in your Oats~i app into their own .html/.hbs files that you can send to the client when they request for a page on a fresh load.

The only requirement is your view structure from the server is the same as the app would have rendered it.

But we're not done yet.

Data Manager Hydration

The views you'll render from your server most likely will represent some state of data. How does Oats~i handle this and proceed from the server-side rendered state?

You'll ideally be using the data manager to manage dynamic or data-driven views in your Oats~i app. Now, using it, you can can leverage server-side hydration that uses a script rendered in the head tag from the server to help the data manager understand the data state from the server, save it, and have attached view managers also update their states based on it, and continue running the app from there.

Here's how it works.

In your markup's head, at the server, you can add a script of the following format:

<script id="hydrator_id">
  const DataManagerHydrationInfo = {
    "info_key": {
      info: model[]
      extras: *
    }
  }
  window.DataManagerHydrationInfo = DataManagerHydrationInfo;
</script>

This script provides important information for the data manager from the server, that gives it the full picture or an idea of the data state.

Each data manager will have an "info_key" that it will read its data state from. Once you set the data manager to hydrate from server side, it will find the script with the id you provide, get the exposed variable DataManagerHydrationInfo, and read the value of "info_key".

This value should be an array, ideally of the same type as the data manager's model. However, it can be different.

That's because the data manager runs a multi-step hydration process.

Validation

Reading from a script can have its own issues and vulnerabilities. You can run a validation check on the data stored in the hydration script before the data manager commits it.

Preprocessing

Depending on your business logic and web app design, the data format sourced from your server can be different from the model you run in your data manager. Oats~i's data manager runs an optional preprocessing step during hydration, that allows you to convert the data from the hydrator to your model's format.

Network Step

This step permits you to be cautious with the data you let free in your hydration script, open to web scrapers, robots, and search engines.

You can run an optional network step where you can get private or hidden data that your data manager's model needs, but should never be privy to web scrapers or robots scouring the web.

For instance, if you're hydrating a shopping cart, you can have the hydration script from the server contain only general information about the products, with public ids that when passed to your secure backend, will return more secret information that you'll use to check-out the user.

So, your hydration script can hold information as basic as what is already rendered in the html, have the data manager commit that immediately internally, then source everything else from the network cycle.

What Next for Oats~i?

If you've managed to read up to this point, kudos, you're a champ! That's the best I could do to try and squeeze roughly four years of work into a small "introductory" blog post.

Oats~i has been a massive learning project for me and am both anxious and excited to let the tech community know about it. There's a lot to unpack, teach, learn, and debug.

My plan at the moment is to open source Oats~i. I'm working on the specifics and hopefully the whole codebase will drop in the next few days and we can all dig in, build actual web apps through the framework, and take it up its paces.

For now, I'll appreciate your feedback, comments, and questions concerning Oats~i, if you have any.
Check out Verte Environmental Solution's website and see it in action.

I'm available on LinkedIn, so drop by and say hi.

See you soon, when we'll, hopefully, start building with Oats~i.

EDIT: The source code is now public. https://github.com/Oats-i/Oats-i

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