cellery

Cellery

WIP - A stream-driven cross-platform UI framework

Cellery is a minimal UI framework built around streams. Components called Cells subscribe to events and emit render instructions — no virtual DOM, no framework lock-in. Any Adapter can consume the output: HTML, TUI, native, mobile, whatever fits your use case.

How it works

Cellery sits at the end of a pipeline. Writers (state machines, database change feeds, RPC streams) push events in, and Cells react by emitting render instructions out.

This publishes events to Cellery which you can subscribe to.

const { Cellery } = require('cellery')

pipeline(
  myWriter,
  new Transform({
    transform(status, cb) {
      this.push({ event: 'something-happened', status })
      cb()
    }
  }),
  cellery
)

Cells subscribe to events and re-render reactively:

const welcome = new Message({ id: 'welcome', value: 'Welcome', cellery })

welcome.sub({ event: 'login' }, (cell, { user }) => {
  cell.value = `Welcome back ${user.displayName}`
  cell.render({ id: 'messages', insert: 'beforeend' })
})

Or you render Cells at will, passing details how they should render:

const msg = new Message({ value: 'Use /join <invite> to join a room', cellery })
msg.render({ id: 'messages', insert: 'beforeend' })

Rendering is handled by Adapters. Currently these are simply called by Cellery to render components when components manually choose to be re-rendered. By default they pass along meta so your adapter can figure out what to do with them. But there's no rules, no lifecycles. Just streams of content and events for your to react to as you need.

Cells

We're trying to keep Cells simple. A super basic set of low level components to see how much can be achieved with little.

Cell	Description
Cell	Base class for all components
MultiCell	Composes multiple cells into one render
Container	Layout wrapper with scroll and flex opts
App	Root cell, id is always 'app'
Text	Inline text content
Paragraph	Block text content
Input	Text input, single or multiline

Decorations

Style primitives passed to cells — Adapters decide how to apply them. Just more meta for you to render with.

• Color — RGBA color, construct from hex or object
• Spacing — padding/margin with all, symmetric, or only
• Border — border width and color
• BoxDecoration — wraps border (and future decoration props)
• Alignment — horizontal or vertical layout direction with justify/items
• Size — named size tokens: xs, s, m, l, xl

Renderers

Adapters must implement a single render(cell) method and return content in whatever format they need. The framework makes no assumptions about output format.

Status

Work in progress. API subject to change.