📦 Carboard.js

Welcome to Cardboard. An extremely light (around 18kb), performant, and very simple reactive framework. It offers almost everything you'd expect from a complete framework. Like managing state, components, logic, and the rest. But with a twist, you don't need to write any HTML, CSS, or JSX if you don't want to. See what it can do.

It's similar in philosophy to VanJS, if that rings a bell, but with many more features, and a more extensive API.

!NOTE!: Cardboard is in development, use it with caution.
You can check the v1.0.0 milestone for a view on the development state - help is much appreciated!

const Counter = () => {
  const count = state(0);

  return button()
    .text(`Clicked $count times`, { count })
    .addStyle('color', 'gray')
    .stylesIf(count, { color: 'black' }) // If count > 0, it will make the color black
    .clicked((_) => count.value++);
};

// Counter will be added to the body
tag('(body)').append(Counter());

🔸 Getting Started - for a getting started guide.

🔸 Wiki - for human documentation, and examples.

🔸 Documentation - for technical docs.

Setup

Install

npm install https://github.com/nombrekeff/cardboard-js

Setup

import { tag, init, allTags } from 'cardboard-js';
// Or
import { tag, init, allTags } from 'node_modules/cardboard-js/dist/cardboard.js';

const { div, p, span, b, script, button, style, a, hr } = allTags;

const root = attach(tag('(body)'));

root.append(div(p('Hello world!')));

Single file script

If you want to add it to your site and start using Cardboard, you can import the bundle file:

<script src="https://github.com/nombrekeff/cardboard-js/raw/main/node_modules/cardboard-js/dist/bundle/cardboard.bundle.js"></script>
<script>
const { div, p } = Carboard.allTags;
</script>

What does it do?

The philosophy is to be able to create fully functional and performat web apps without the need to use HTML, CSS, or JSX. Just JS or TS. Instead of writing HTML and then creating JS that interacts with the HTML, and adding CSS to style the page. You directly write code that represents both the HTML, CSS, state, and logic.

You also don't need to have a build/compile process (unless you use TS or want to). Given that cardboard is so lightweight, you can write your app as an es6 module (check this example to see an example setup), so there's no need for any build process, at least for development.

It offers a robust state management solution out of the box. The concept is similar to react. You create a state, then use the state in your app, and whenever the state changes it automatically updates wherever you've used it.

Here is a list of some of the features it offers (there are more though):

• NO HTML: You don't need to write those nifty little angle brackets anymore! You can create any HTML with Cardboard.
• State: Out-of-the-box reactive state.
• Manipulation: Manipulate any HTML properties of any element, manually and based on state. i.e. adding classes, showing/hiding elements, removing styles, listening to events, and much more...
• Logic: Add logic in a very ergonomic and simple way.
• Text Templates: Easy text and template manipulation when working with states.
• Components: You can create reusable components, like in any other framework.
• Tweening: Extremely simple tweening out of the box.
• Routing: Create single page apps like a breeze.
• CSS in JS: You can create style tags, and write the CSS directly as a JS object.
• Typed: Cardboard aims to be 100% typed, meaning it will suggest any suggestable properties, methods, etc...(i.e. style properties, etc...)
• ATAP: As tested as possible!

NOTE: There's also a server-side alternative to Cardboard I've also written, called Hobo. In case you need something similar to Cardboard that works server-side! I'm planning to make Cardboard work server-side as well in v2.0.0. So you can look forward to that, or help out!

Who's this for?

If you don't like writing HTML, CSS or JSX, like me. Or need a simple and lightweight framework that can do most things that bigger frameworks can do with a smaller footprint while being very performant, Cardboard might be for you! Cardboard can be used to build anything from a static page to more advanced apps, like dashboards. It should be able to do most things!

But it's perfect for when you want to create a very small page where you need a reactive framework and you need to create it fast.

Backstory

I'm not going to lie, I didn't expect I'd be writing this when I first started writing Cardboard. It was supposed to be a little experiment for another project of mine (Hobo) that I thought would fail.
What was the experiment? I hear you asking. Well, it was just to make Hobo work with the DOM, instead of rendering HTML as a string. It's funny how things play out sometimes! We never know when we're going to build something to be proud of.

You can read an article I made on how I made the initial draft of cardboard!

I will not tell you the full story but know that Cardboard started as an experiment meant to fail. But for some reason, every piece started to fit perfectly with one another, until today, where Cardboard could be considered functional. Not finished though, it's still a lot of work before that point. That takes us to you. I, hopefully, ask you to consider helping out. Let's make Cardboard worth it's contents ;)

Why the name?: Funny story, well not really. It's named Cardboard to keep on the brand of Hobo. But you could think it's named that, because, like cardboard, it's useful, light, versatile and cheap.

Contributing

Well, hello! I'm always open for help on projects, and this one in particular! If you find the project interesting, useful, fun, or you feel some other kind of emotion, and that emotion inclines you to maybe consider helping out, that'd be great!

You can help with the Wiki, using and testing the project, reporting bugs, fixing bugs, adding features, etc... Just remember to leave an issue if the change is big or changes some core concept of cardboard.

Take a look at these guides:

• Development Project Setup
• Contributing Guide