Ractive.js, Japanese DailyJS Translations

Ractive

Ryan McDonough sent in Ractive.js (GitHub: Rich-Harris/Ractive, License: MIT, Bower: ractive), a new alternative to libraries like AngularJS, created by developers at The Guardian. Are we still calling these libraries MVC, MV*, or something else?

Ractive.js is different. It solves some of the biggest headaches in web development - data
...

Ractive

Ractive.js is different. It solves some of the biggest headaches in web development - data binding, efficient DOM updates, event handling - and does so with almost no learning curve.

There’s a nice and short example in the documentation. Given the following HTML fragment:

<p>Hello ! You have
    <strong> new messages</strong>.
</p>

Then the Ractive constructor can be used to populate data:

varractive=newRactive({el:result,template:html,data:{user:'Dave',messages:{total:11,unread:4}}});ractive.set('messages.unread',5);

However…:

Ractive.js constructs a parallel DOM representation which is aware of its dependencies on the values of user and messages.unread. When those values change, it knows exactly which parts of the real DOM need to be updated.

This could be the data-binding library with an idiomatic JavaScript API that we’ve been looking for. By focusing on the “data model” problem the project seems immediately easier to understand than some larger libraries, and the early adoption of Bower and Grunt means it should be straightforward to slot into your projects.

Japanese DailyJS Translations

Hideharu Sakai sent in his translation of my recent “Getting started with Nodebots” article: Nodebot を始めよう（著者：アレックス・ヤング）. He said there’s a lot of interest in Node and DailyJS from the Japanese developer community, so thanks for that!