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Glimmer – Fast and light-weight UI components

glimmerjs.com

21–30 of 133 posts

Re: Glimmer – Fast and light-weight UI components

#21

Glimmer is smaller and faster than React, with TypeScript supported natively. This is a game-changer for people who are looking for a lightweight rendering library that ships with great tooling support and a larger framework ecosystem behind it.

The install parameter you provide already requires yarn and the rather large ember-cli, in addition to requiring my app to be built on top of glimmer instead of with it. How can this possibly be considered remotely lightweight, especially compared to something like Mithril? I count at least 12 repos on your github that seem to be integral components including a dedicated CLI!

A legitimate question!

One thing people really love about Ember is that the process for going from nothing to a working app is very streamlined. Typically, this is not the case with smaller component libraries. Personally, I think there's a market for opinionated tools on this side of the simplicity spectrum.

Another aspect of this is that more complex build tools can often do better analysis of your app and move more work to build time, improving the boot and/or runtime performance of your app. For me, I'll trade a longer npm install time if it leads to a better experience for users.

That said, all of the Glimmer packages are distributed as AMD, CommonJS and JavaScript modules on npm[0], with a `module` field and everything in their package.json. While it's not as turnkey as using Ember CLI, I hope people feel empowered to experiment with whatever their favorite build tools are.

[0]: https://www.npmjs.com/org/glimmer

Re: Glimmer – Fast and light-weight UI components

#22
post #14

As a long time (5 years full time) Ember developer, this is quite interesting to me philosophically. I've spent a lot of time trying to tell people that all the stuff in Ember is there for a reason; for example, you're going to need a router, you're going to need support for controllers, etc. I still feel strongly that if your app is large and serious you are going to need that stuff. But. A lot of people just want t…

I used Ember for about 2 years and thought so too. Now I'm using React and I think it's approach is much better. The API is tiny compared to Ember and there aren't much concepts, still it accomplishes everything Ember did. I feel bad to say this, but in the modular, library heavy, NPM based JS world of today, React (and other component frameworks like Cyclejs or hyperapp) fits just in. While Ember feels like a anachr…

With Glimmer as a standalone library, I think ember's going in the right direction. There's been some excellent work on Fastboot and Engines in the last year or so and I really like the approach ember's team is taking with this.

React, for me, still offers better composability. You deal in plain JS objects, pass them around, and can build really complex UIs on top of that. I also really like redux. I still use ember heavily though; I think we'll get there as well!

Re: Glimmer – Fast and light-weight UI components

#23
post #14

As a long time (5 years full time) Ember developer, this is quite interesting to me philosophically. I've spent a lot of time trying to tell people that all the stuff in Ember is there for a reason; for example, you're going to need a router, you're going to need support for controllers, etc. I still feel strongly that if your app is large and serious you are going to need that stuff. But. A lot of people just want t…

I used Ember for about 2 years and thought so too. Now I'm using React and I think it's approach is much better. The API is tiny compared to Ember and there aren't much concepts, still it accomplishes everything Ember did. I feel bad to say this, but in the modular, library heavy, NPM based JS world of today, React (and other component frameworks like Cyclejs or hyperapp) fits just in. While Ember feels like a anachr…

That hasn't been my experience with ember in the past 1.5 years. Granted when I was first introduced to it about 3 years ago, there were many issues and I wasn't keen on using it but since then things have improved a bunch.

Re: Glimmer – Fast and light-weight UI components

#24
post #12

For those that want to try it out, it looks like the released ember-cli version doesn't support it. To test it out, you can replace the first instruction on that page with: `yarn global add ember-cli/ember-cli` (edited for better command)

This will do the trick:

    yarn global add ember-cli/ember-cli

Re: Glimmer – Fast and light-weight UI components

#25
post #19

Did not find easily any live example, should be required for any "UI" library. And should be displayed on the frontpage

The API docs themselves are a Glimmer app: https://glimmerjs.com/api/. The source code is here: https://github.com/glimmerjs/glimmer-api-docs

You may also enjoy the prerequisite turbo-stress-test app:

https://glimmerjs.com/demos/uptime-boxes/

https://github.com/glimmerjs/glimmer-demos

Re: Glimmer – Fast and light-weight UI components

#26
post #22
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Ember for about 2 years and thought so too. Now I'm using React and I think it's approach is much better. The API is tiny compared to Ember and there aren't much concepts, still it accomplishes everything Ember did. I feel bad to say this, but in the modular, library heavy, NPM based JS world of today, React (and other component frameworks like Cyclejs or hyperapp) fits just in. While Ember feels like a anachr…

With Glimmer as a standalone library, I think ember's going in the right direction. There's been some excellent work on Fastboot and Engines in the last year or so and I really like the approach ember's team is taking with this. React, for me, still offers better composability. You deal in plain JS objects, pass them around, and can build really complex UIs on top of that. I also really like redux. I still use ember…

I think Ember is really good at marketing the stuff they work on, but it is usually overhyped.

Fastboot, for example, was announced what, 3 years ago? The readme says it's still not ready to use:

> The bottom line is that you should not (yet) expect to install this add-on in your production app and have FastBoot work.

https://github.com/ember-fastboot/ember-cli-fastboot

I find this is often true of Ember projects (like Glimmer 1), a lot of hype for something that has a lot of rough edges.

Re: Glimmer – Fast and light-weight UI components

#27
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Ember for about 2 years and thought so too. Now I'm using React and I think it's approach is much better. The API is tiny compared to Ember and there aren't much concepts, still it accomplishes everything Ember did. I feel bad to say this, but in the modular, library heavy, NPM based JS world of today, React (and other component frameworks like Cyclejs or hyperapp) fits just in. While Ember feels like a anachr…

That hasn't been my experience with ember in the past 1.5 years. Granted when I was first introduced to it about 3 years ago, there were many issues and I wasn't keen on using it but since then things have improved a bunch.

Nice to hear, I haven't used Ember for about 2 years now. When they started putting more effort in their CLI, this was the signal for me to jump ship and go for something more light weight.

Re: Glimmer – Fast and light-weight UI components

#28
post #14

As a long time (5 years full time) Ember developer, this is quite interesting to me philosophically. I've spent a lot of time trying to tell people that all the stuff in Ember is there for a reason; for example, you're going to need a router, you're going to need support for controllers, etc. I still feel strongly that if your app is large and serious you are going to need that stuff. But. A lot of people just want t…

I used Ember for about 2 years and thought so too. Now I'm using React and I think it's approach is much better. The API is tiny compared to Ember and there aren't much concepts, still it accomplishes everything Ember did. I feel bad to say this, but in the modular, library heavy, NPM based JS world of today, React (and other component frameworks like Cyclejs or hyperapp) fits just in. While Ember feels like a anachr…

Why would you want to build a bespoke React-based framework for every app you make? Why not simply have everything you need out of the box, plus the ability to easily integrate any npm library into your app via first-class build tooling that is miles easier to use than something clunky like Webpack?

Re: Glimmer – Fast and light-weight UI components

#30
post #26
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Glimmer as a standalone library, I think ember's going in the right direction. There's been some excellent work on Fastboot and Engines in the last year or so and I really like the approach ember's team is taking with this. React, for me, still offers better composability. You deal in plain JS objects, pass them around, and can build really complex UIs on top of that. I also really like redux. I still use ember…

I think Ember is really good at marketing the stuff they work on, but it is usually overhyped. Fastboot, for example, was announced what, 3 years ago? The readme says it's still not ready to use: > The bottom line is that you should not (yet) expect to install this add-on in your production app and have FastBoot work. https://github.com/ember-fastboot/ember-cli-fastboot I find this is often true of Ember projects (li…

At the end of the day, the Ember team takes a lot of time to not just build things the right way, but also make it as painless as possible for teams to upgrade along the blessed path. This has been a learning process to understand how much more time that takes, and has caused some past announcements to feel like they weren't delivered on, when in fact they simply just took more time to get right.
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