Clearwater is a rich front-end framework for building fast, reasonable, and easily composable browser applications in Ruby. It renders to a virtual DOM and applies the virtual DOM to the browser's actual DOM to update only what has changed on the page.
Add these lines to your application's Gemfile:
gem 'clearwater'
gem 'opal-rails' # Only if you're using Rails
This is a minimum-viable Clearwater app:
require 'opal'
require 'clearwater'
class HelloWorld
include Clearwater::Component
def render
h1('Hello, world!')
end
end
app = Clearwater::Application.new(component: HelloWorld.new)
app.call
Clearwater has three distinct parts:
- The component: the presenter and template engine
- The router (optional): the dispatcher and control
- The application: the "Go" button
The Component
class Blog
# All components need a set of behavior, but don't worry it's not a massive list.
include Clearwater::Component
# This method needs to return a virtual-DOM element using the element DSL.
# The DSL is provided by the Clearwater::Component mixin.
def render
div([
Articles.new,
Biography.new,
])
end
end
While we use two components in this example, you can use all of these as well:
# <div id="foo">
# <h1>Heading</h1>
# <article>hello!</article>
# </div>
def render
div({ id: 'foo' }, [
h1('Heading'),
article('hello!'),
])
end
# <div>Hello, world!</div>
def render
div('Hello, world!')
end
# <div>123</div>
def render
div(123)
end
# <div></div>
def render
div
end
The Router
router = Clearwater::Router.new do
# A route with a block contains subordinate routes
route 'blog' => Blog.new do # /blog
route 'new_article' => NewArticle.new # /blog/new_article
# This path contains a dynamic segment. Inside this component, you can use
# router.params[:article_id] to return the value for this segment of the
# URL. So for "/articles/123", router.params[:article_id] would be "123".
route ':article_id' => ArticleReader.new # /blog/123
end
end
You can also use Clearwater as part of the Rails asset pipeline. First create your Clearwater application (replace app/assets/javascripts/application.js
with this file):
require 'opal' # Not necessary if you load Opal from a CDN
require 'clearwater'
class Layout
include Clearwater::Component
def render
h1('Hello, world!')
end
end
app = Clearwater::Application.new(component: Layout.new)
app.call
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<!-- snip -->
<body>
<!--
We load the JS in the body tag to ensure the element exists so we can
render to it. Otherwise, we need to use events on the document before we
instantiate and call the Clearwater app. And that's no fun.
-->
<%= javascript_include_tag 'application' %>
</body>
</html>
Then you need to get Rails to render a blank page, so add these two routes:
root 'home#index'
get '*all' => 'home#index'
You can omit the second line if your Clearwater app doesn't use routing. It just tells Rails to let your Clearwater app handle all routes.
class HomeController < ApplicationController
def index
end
end
<!-- This page intentionally left blank -->
You can use the Rails generators to generate the controller and view (rails g controller home index
), but it won't set up the root and catch-all routes, so you'll still need to do that manually.
Once you've added those files, refresh the page. You should see "Hello, world!" in big, bold letters. Congrats! You've built your first Clearwater app on Rails!
If you're using Roda, you'll want to use the roda-opal_assets
gem to get an asset-pipeline-style workflow for compiling your Clearwater app into JavaScript.
Use the clearwater-roda
gem to generate a starter Clearwater app that demonstrates many components working together, routing, and even state management (via grand_central
).
You can experiment with Clearwater using the Clearwater Playground. You can also explore other saved playground experiments.
This project is governed by a Code of Conduct
- Fork it
- Branch it
- Hack it
- Save it
- Commit it
- Push it
- Pull-request it
Copyright (c) 2014-2018 Jamie Gaskins
MIT License
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