Building AlpineJS
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Ever wonder how a front-end framework works under the hood? In this series, I (the creator of AlpineJS) will walk you through what it takes to actually build one from scratch. By the end of the series, you will learn what’s involved in creating a modern, reactive, front-end framework by actually building one yourself. It’s easier than you might think!
It All Starts With The Data
Every Alpine component starts with an x-data attribute. In this episode, we explore what goes into turning the value of x-data into something usable by our new framework.
Bringing The DOM To Life
Rather than manipulating the DOM manually, frameworks like Alpine allow you to focus on managing data, while they take care of updating the DOM for you. In this episode, we’ll write a function called refreshDom() which will handle this process for us and bring the DOM to life!
Making Things Reactive
Reactivity is the core of most front-end frameworks. If you change the data, the web page updates automatically. In this episode, we’ll look into the meaning of “reactivity” and then implement it ourselves. With the help of modern JavaScript, a task like this is trivial.
Event Listening
Alpine allows you to listen for events like “clicks” and “key presses” by declaring special attributes in your HTML. This is yet another task that can be cumbersome to implement manually. Now, this process is made simple by adding an attribute like “@click” to an element. In this episode, we’ll implement a system to process and handle these attributes.
Refactoring For Flexibility
So far in the series, we have a basic working version of Alpine. However, the implementation is tailored for the specific example we’ve been using in this series. In this episode, we’ll make a few refactors to make the codebase more flexible and support other use cases and functionality.
How We Compare With “The Real” AlpineJS
Now that we’ve seen first hand what it takes to build a basic version of AlpineJS, let’s take a look at the ACTUAL Alpine source code and see how similar it is to ours. We’ll take an informal stroll around Alpine and see if we can recognize similarities in some core functionality.
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