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

$3

``js
'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);
`

$3

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

$3

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

$3

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

$3

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

- mercury leverages [virtual-dom][virtual-dom] which uses
an immutable vdom structure
- mercury comes with [observ-struct][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][vtree] with
[react][react] or swap out [observ-struct][observ-struct]
with [backbone][backbone]

See the modules README for more
information.

Documentation

See the documentation folder

$3

See the FAQ document

$3

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

`sh
git clone git@github.com:Raynos/mercury
cd mercury
npm install
npm test
`

$3

- 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][react] for documenting and explaining the concept
of a virtual DOM and its diffing algorithm
- [om][om] for explaining the concept and benefits of
immutable state and time travel.
- [elm][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][elm] in javascript
([graphics][graphics])
- [reflex`][reflex] for demonstrating the techniques used to
implement dynamic inputs.

Contributors

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

MIT Licenced

[1]: https://secure.travis-ci.org/Raynos/mercury.svg
[2]: https://travis-ci.org/Raynos/mercury
[3]: https://badge.fury.io/js/mercury.svg
[4]: https://badge.fury.io/js/mercury
[5]: http://img.shields.io/coveralls/Raynos/mercury.svg
[6]: https://coveralls.io/r/Raynos/mercury
[7]: https://gemnasium.com/Raynos/mercury.png
[8]: https://gemnasium.com/Raynos/mercury
[9]: https://david-dm.org/Raynos/mercury.svg
[10]: https://david-dm.org/Raynos/mercury
[11]: https://img.shields.io/badge/GITTER-join%20chat-green.svg
[12]: https://gitter.im/Raynos/mercury
[13]: https://badge-size.herokuapp.com/Raynos/mercury/master/dist/mercury.js
[14]: https://badge-size.herokuapp.com/Raynos/mercury/master/dist/mercury.js

[graphics]: https://github.com/Raynos/graphics
[elm]: https://github.com/elm-lang/Elm
[react]: https://github.com/facebook/react
[om]: https://github.com/swannodette/om
[reflex]: https://github.com/Gozala/reflex
[backbone]: https://github.com/jashkenas/backbone
[quiescent]: https://github.com/levand/quiescent
[virtual-dom]: https://github.com/Matt-Esch/virtual-dom
[vtree]: https://github.com/Matt-Esch/virtual-dom/tree/master/vtree
[vdom]: https://github.com/Matt-Esch/virtual-dom/tree/master/vdom
[vdom-create-element]: https://github.com/Matt-Esch/virtual-dom/blob/master/vdom/create-element.js
[vdom-patch]: https://github.com/Matt-Esch/virtual-dom/blob/master/vdom/patch.js
[min-document]: https://github.com/Raynos/min-document
[virtual-hyperscript]: https://github.com/Matt-Esch/virtual-dom/tree/master/virtual-hyperscript
[main-loop]: https://github.com/Raynos/main-loop
[vdom-thunk]: https://github.com/Raynos/vdom-thunk
[observ]: https://github.com/Raynos/observ
[observ-computed]: https://github.com/Raynos/observ/blob/master/computed.js
[observ-struct]: https://github.com/Raynos/observ-struct
[observ-array]: https://github.com/Raynos/observ-array
[geval]: https://github.com/Raynos/geval
[dom-delegator]: https://github.com/Raynos/dom-delegator
[value-event]: https://github.com/Raynos/value-event