mercury

mercury

Deprecated: Not actively being worked on.

Instead tonic and https://tonic.technology/ are actively being worked on.

mercury has some interesting ideas but they are not very practical at scale. tonic is a lightweigth component system on top of web components that leverages the browsers HTML parser for the heavy lifting instead of virtual-dom.

It comes with a set of components which help with building apps more quickly by having some re-usable components out of the box.

Description

A truly modular frontend framework

To understand what I mean by truly modular just read the source

Examples

Hello world

'use strict';

var document = require('global/document');
var hg = require('mercury');
var h = require('mercury').h;

function App() {
    return hg.state({
        value: hg.value(0),
        channels: {
            clicks: incrementCounter
        }
    });
}

function incrementCounter(state) {
    state.value.set(state.value() + 1);
}

App.render = function render(state) {
    return h('div.counter', [
        'The state ', h('code', 'clickCount'),
        ' has value: ' + state.value + '.', h('input.button', {
            type: 'button',
            value: 'Click me!',
            'ev-click': hg.send(state.channels.clicks)
        })
    ]);
};

hg.app(document.body, App(), App.render);

Basic Examples

• count
• shared-state
• bmi-counter
• canvas
• async-state
• real-dom

Intermediate Examples

• TodoMVC
• markdown editor
• number-input
• serverside rendering
• login form
• geometry
• 2048 (wip)
• github issues (wip)
• hot reloading with browserify or webpack

Unidirectional examples

The following examples demonstrate how you can mix & match mercury with other frameworks. This is possible because mercury is fundamentally modular.

Disclaimer: The following are neither "good" nor "bad" ideas. Your milage may vary on using these ideas

• Backbone + Mercury
• Immutable + Mercury
• JSX + Mercury

Motivation

Mercury vs React

mercury is similar to react, however it's larger in scope, it is better compared against om or quiescent

• mercury leverages virtual-dom which uses an immutable vdom structure
• mercury comes with observ-struct which uses immutable data for your state atom
• mercury is truly modular, you can trivially swap out subsets of it for other modules
• mercury source code itself is maintainable, the modules it uses are all small, well tested and well documented. You should not be afraid to use mercury in production as it's easy to maintain & fix.
• mercury encourages zero dom manipulation in your application code. As far as your application is concerned elements do not exist. This means you don't need to reference DOM elements when rendering or when handling events
• mercury is compact, it's 11kb min.gzip.js, that's smaller than backbone.
• mercury strongly encourages FRP techniques and discourages local mutable state.
• mercury is highly performant, it's faster than React / Om / ember+htmlbars in multiple benchmarks TodoMVC benchmark
  animation benchmark TodoMVC benchmark source
• mercury comes with FP features like time-travel / easy undo out of the box.
• mercury is lean, it's an weekend's read at 2.5kloc. (virtual-dom is 1.1kloc, an evening's read.) compared to react which is almost 20kloc (a month's read)

Modules

mercury is a small glue layer that composes a set of modules that solves a subset of the frontend problem.

If mercury is not ideal for your needs, you should check out the individual modules and see if you can re-use something.

Alternatively if the default set of modules in mercury doesn't work for you, you can just require other modules. It's possible to for example, swap out vtree with react or swap out observ-struct with backbone

See the modules README for more information.

Documentation

See the documentation folder

FAQ

See the FAQ document

API

WIP. In lieu of documentation please see examples :(

Installation

npm install mercury

Development

If you want to develop on mercury you can clone the code

git clone [e-mail]:Raynos/mercury
cd mercury
npm install
npm test

npm run tasks

• npm test runs the tests
• npm run jshint will run jshint on the code
• npm run disc will open discify (if globally installed)
• npm run build will build the html assets for gh-pages
• npm run examples will start a HTTP server that shows examples
• npm run dist will create a distributed version of mercury
• npm run modules-docs will (re)generate docs of mercury modules

Inspirations

A lot of the philosophy and design of mercury is inspired by the following:

• react for documenting and explaining the concept of a virtual DOM and its diffing algorithm
• om for explaining the concept and benefits of immutable state and time travel.
• elm for explaining the concept of FRP and having a reference implementation of FRP in JavaScript. I wrote a pre-cursor to mercury that was literally a re-implementation of elm in javascript (graphics)
• reflex for demonstrating the techniques used to implement dynamic inputs.

Contributors

• Raynos
• Matt-Esch
• neonstalwart
• parshap
• nrw
• kumavis

MIT Licenced