Show HN: My new JavaScript MVC framework

Framework fatigue is understandable. Need? No. Want? Yes and maybe. Fortunately, no one's forced to use any one thing. That's because of the answer to your question: yes, no, and maybe. Do we really need another app? Another book? New languages? More music? Yet another program? People choosing their time and pursuits is what leads to countless dead-ends and countless progress. One might want to fear a day when the generality of a no displaces the spirit of a yes, about whether an activity is justified inherently.

I think this is the same taste-maturation that many woodworkers experience. At first, you salivate over these crazy, overly specific, over engineered power tools. Over time, you start to really love things that are stupidly simple instead, like a card scraper, or a hand plane.

Hi, Mithril's author here. I'll just put a big comment here, and hopefully everyone can see it.

@stronglikedan: I don't have plans for extending the core (in fact, keeping it small and modular is a major focus point for me). I do have a list of things I want to tackle next (see the roadmap page), but I'll most likely release them separately from core.

@hcho: re: integrating w/ jQuery: see the integrating w/ other libraries page in the guide section. There's a simple example w/ select2 there.

@abjorn: those are excellent points. Re: turing completeness: my take is that things like good error messages in the view layer are more important than trying to prevent people from doing stupid things (that's what code reviews are for). Re: Bindings: I'm most familiar w/ Angular ones and yes, their bidi-bindings are really convenient, but they fail in some 5-10% of the use cases for me (either by being too aggressive or not expressive enough). So, that's a conciseness vs power trade-off in design from my personal experience. Re: templating, you can take the model-level utilities and integrate w/ other templating libraries. I do provide some comparisons w/ React and a few other frameworks in the misc section of the guide, as well as design rationales in the main guide page. TL;DR I use other frameworks full-time and I've done homework before I settled on the current implementation :)

@hanburglar I do provide a tool to convert HTML to Mithril (although not automated yet), see the "useful tools" page.

@timmiwil: you're right, jQuery is not MVC (I mention this in the comparisons page). The point is that with idiomatic jQuery, the app developer is responsible for knowing when to use .text() instead of .html(), whereas with, say, idiomatic Angular, that's not a concern, ever. jQuery "templating" tends to get pretty hard to audit as widgets become more complex (see select2 source code, for example)

@tzaman: I do contribute to Angular and other projects that I use as time permits (mostly bug reports)

@BaconJuice: it's a side project, but a scratch-an-itch one that I work on pretty much every night. Planning on continuing work on it for the foreseable future. I'm also considering introducing it at my day job as well.

@all: thank you for the feedback, I really appreciate :)

Why?

> I wouldn't try to use Angular for an HTML 5 game, for example, though there's a good chance I wouldn't use jQuery either.

I actually did use Angular for an HTML5 game last week as part of a demo for a conference. Admittedly it was a really simple game (tic tac toe), and it did use Polymer as well as angular, as sort of an experiment. But it worked pretty well, and only took about a day and a half to hack together, with realtime multiplayer and chat using socket.io.

Obviously you're going to run into things that Angular is not really ideal for, but we are trying to make it do what it does very, very well, so in the future it should be suitable for pretty much any mobile or desktop app.

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This sounds like evangelism, which is not my intent, you're absolutely right about what you're saying, but it's true, sometimes a framework works (and saves a ton of time) that you'd otherwise spend hacking together something awful. Hopefully this mithril thing also saves people a ton of time without them having to worry about numerous other issues.