Mini-Van is an ultra-lightweight template engine for DOM composition and manipulation. With only 0.5kB in the minized bundle size, Mini-Van enables you to build comprehensive UI with elegant and expressive vanilla JavaScript code:

// Reusable components can be just pure vanilla JavaScript functions.
// Here we capitalize the first letter to follow React conventions.
const Hello = () => div(
  p("👋Hello"),
  ul(
    li("🗺️World"),
    li(a({href: "https://vanjs.org/"}, "🍦VanJS")),
  ),
)

van.add(document.body, Hello())
// Alternatively, you can write:
// document.body.appendChild(Hello())

Try on jsfiddle

You can convert any HTML snippet into Mini-Van code with our online converter.

Mini-Van is the slimmed-down version of VanJS, which aims to provide an ultra-lightweight, zero-dependency, and unopinionated Reactive UI framework based on pure vanilla JavaScript and DOM. Compared to VanJS, Mini-Van further reduces the bundle size to 0.5kB and can be used on the server-side as a template engine.

Server-Side: Deno Integration

Mini-Van can be used on the server side as a template engine to render dynamic web content for HTTP servers. If you use Deno, the integration is fairly straightforward.

There are 2 modes for server-side integration: van-plate mode (based on text templating, thus doesn't need the DOM dependency), and mini-van mode (based on DOM, thus needs the DOM dependency).

`van-plate` mode

In van-plate mode, HTML content is generated purely through text templating. It can be easily integrated with your HTTP server to render dynamic web content. See the sample code below:

import { serve } from "https://deno.land/std@0.184.0/http/server.ts"
import van from "https://deno.land/x/minivan@0.2.11/src/van-plate.js"

const {a, body, li, p, ul} = van.tags

const port = 8080

console.log("Testing DOM rendering...")
// Expecting `<a href="https://vanjs.org/">🍦VanJS</a>` in the console
console.log(a({href: "https://vanjs.org/"}, "🍦VanJS").render())

console.log(`HTTP webserver running. Access it at: http://localhost:${port}/`)
await serve(req => new Response(
  van.html(
    body(
      p("Your user-agent is: ", req.headers.get("user-agent") ?? "Unknown"),
      p("👋Hello"),
      ul(
        li("🗺️World"),
        li(a({href: "https://vanjs.org/"}, "🍦VanJS")),
      ),
    ),
  ),
  {
    status: 200,
    headers: {"content-type": "text/html; charset=utf-8"},
  },
), {port})

As illustrated in the example, render method can be called on the object returned from the tag function to generate a string that can be used for serving.

van.html is a helper function defined in van-plate.js that is equivalent to:

(...args) => "<!DOCTYPE html>" + tags.html(...args).render()

`mini-van` mode

The behavior in mini-van mode is similar to the behavior in browser context. i.e.: DOM objects will be created by tag functions. As Deno doesn't have the built-in support for DOM objects, you need to provide a 3rd-party Document object before integrating with Mini-Van in this mode.

There are multiple 3rd-party options for the Document object. In the example below, we will demonstrate the integration with the help of deno-dom:

import { serve } from "https://deno.land/std@0.184.0/http/server.ts"
import { DOMParser } from "https://deno.land/x/deno_dom@v0.1.38/deno-dom-wasm.ts"
import van from "https://deno.land/x/minivan@0.2.11/src/mini-van.js"

const document = new DOMParser().parseFromString("", "text/html")!
const {tags, html} = van.vanWithDoc(document)
const {a, body, li, p, ul} = tags

const port = 8080

console.log("Testing DOM rendering...")
const anchorDom = a({href: "https://vanjs.org/"}, "🍦VanJS")
// anchorDom is an HTMLAnchorElement
// Expecting `<a href="https://vanjs.org/">🍦VanJS</a>` printed in the console
console.log(anchorDom.outerHTML)

console.log(`HTTP webserver running. Access it at: http://localhost:${port}/`)
await serve(req => new Response(
  html(
    body(
      p("Your user-agent is: ", req.headers.get("user-agent") ?? "Unknown"),
      p("👋Hello"),
      ul(
        li("🗺️World"),
        li(a({href: "https://vanjs.org/"}, "🍦VanJS")),
      ),
    ),
  ),
  {
    status: 200,
    headers: {"content-type": "text/html; charset=utf-8"},
  },
), {port})

Similar to van-plate mode, we have a helper function html defined in mini-van.js which is equivalent to:

(...args) => "<!DOCTYPE html>" + tags.html(...args).outerHTML

Client-Side: Getting Started

To get started on the client side, download the latest version mini-van-0.2.11.min.js and add the line below to your script:

import van from "./mini-van-0.2.11.min.js"

To code without ES6 modules, you can download the bundled version mini-van-0.2.11.nomodule.min.js and add the following line to your HTML file instead:

<script type="text/javascript" src="mini-van-0.2.11.nomodule.min.js"></script>

You can find all relevant Mini-Van files in this Download Table.

API Reference

Mini-Van exposes the same set of APIs as VanJS for DOM composition and manipulation. Thus for API reference, you can refer to DOM Composition and Manipulation section of VanJS tutorial. Note that: state and state binding are not supported in Mini-Van.

Contact Us

tao@vanjs.org

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Package last updated on 10 May 2023

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