Differences with other frameworks

Although Boyo Core is different, it get it's inspiration from existing and passed prior arts from the ecosystem. Mainly, Vue/Petite-Vue and Alpine.

Full blown SPA frameworks

Boyo Core defers from frameworks like Vue, React, Angular, Svelte and Solid in that it leverages and relies solely on the native DOM, instead of relying on abstractions like a Virtual DOM or bundler optimized code. Boyo Core expects no build tool to be used to get the most optimized version of a component or an app. In fact, you can consider a "Boyo component" as a "super duper extended HTML element with super powers", as an "enhanced HTML element" rather than a "component" in the sens of general JavaScript frameworks. Boyo Core is also not too concerned with rendering HTML templates from the client side.

At it's core, a Boyo component simply hooks it's behavior onto an existing node in the DOM tree, how it get's access to this DOM node is of no interest to the said component.

Therefore, Boyo components need not to concerne themself with concepts like: SSR, hydration, reconciliation, resumability, rendering, routing etc..., the DOM is the source of truth.

Does this mean SPAs cannot be created using Boyo?

In a sense yes, but in another, no. Not in the way SPAs are traditionally thought of.

If SPAs are defined, as the MDN docs does, as being "a web app implementation that loads only a single web document, and then updates the body content of that single document via JavaScript APIs such as XMLHttpRequest and Fetch when different content is to be shown." than yes.

Such an implementation enables the following:

  • Navigation does not require full page reloads as the DOM gets dynamically swapped for new content
  • States are preserved between navigation
  • Appropriate resources are dynamically loaded and added to the page as necessary

But if in addition to the above SPAs are considered to absolutely need to function in the following manner:

  • The initial document only presents a shell with an element onto which the page will be initialized on
  • The page to be initialized must wait for JavaScript to be downloaded, parsed and executed
  • New page content must be served using JSON

than no.

SPAs created with Boyo should be SEO friendly by default and HTML should be the name of the game.

Interactivity "sprinkling" frameworks

  • // TODO: Explain how Boyo Core is more similar to Petite-Vue and Alpine, but with major differences
  • // TODO: Explain differences
    • Biggest one: no "in template evaluation & reactivity" in Boyo
    • Boyo praises itself in "extending" regular DOM elements
    • Custom Elements are first class citizens
    • Being close to the "web platform" & standards
    • Regular VueJS's reactivity concepts/behaviours/features (composition API)
    • Advanced features: dependency injection (provide/inject), composables, ...
    • ...