Freeloader.js

Freeloader.js is a declarative behavior system for server-rendered webapps. It consists of two main pieces:

1. A way to declare which controller definitions get bound to which elements.
2. Tools for loading new content into the DOM.

Installation

Install via npm:

$ npm install freeloader-js --save

Creating an app

A freeloader app looks like this:

var freeloader = require('freeloader-js')
var app = freeloader()

Controllers

Once you have your app, you can declaratively add behaviors, in the form of controllers.

app.bind('#banner', { ... });
app.bind('#menu', { ... });
app.bind('#login-form', { ... });

Example

Here's an example of a controller that keeps its element's aspect ratio constant, both when it's first created and when the window changes size:

app.bind('#my .selector', {
 
  life: {
    mount: 'setSize'
  },
  
  subs: {
    orientationchange: 'setSize',
    resize: 'setSize'
  },
  
  setSize: function(){
    this.width = this.$el.width();
    this.$el.css('height',(width/2)+'px');
  }
});
 
$(window).on('resize', function(){
  app.publish('resize');
});
 
$(window).on('orientationchange', function(){
  app.publish('orientationchange');
});

Events

As evident above, controllers are simply event routers for parts of your page. "Events" brings to mind DOM events, but those are just one kind of event a controller can respond to. Types of events include:

• Controller lifecycle events
• Messages from ancestor controllers
• Messages from descendant controllers
• Subscriptions to globally-published events
• DOM events

Ancestor and descendant controllers just means controller instances attached to elements higher or lower in DOM tree. There are no rules or limits about what the hierarchy can look like. You can bind one controller to many elements, or multiple controllers to a single element. A controller has a regular structure:

app.bind(<selector>, {
 
  <event name>: {
    <event name>: <method name>
    <event name>: <method name>
  },
  
  <method name>: <function>
  <method name>: <function>
 
  <event name>: {
    <event name>: <method name>
    <event name>: <method name>
  },
  
  <method name>: <function>
  <method name>: <function>
});

Here are the event names, along with how it's triggered.

• life - Lifecycle events. Triggered internally by freeloader. Event names are limited to init and mount.
• events - DOM events. Triggered by the user. Event names take the form <type> <selector> (for delegated events) or <type> (for non-delegated events).
• above - Ancestor messages. Sent by ancestor controllers, using this.down(name).
• below - Descendant messages. Sent by descendant controllers, using this.up(name).
• subs - Subscription events. Sent by any controller, using this.publish(name). Alternatively, sent from non-controller contexts as long as you have a reference to the app, via app.publish(name).

Reference-keeping

All reference-keeping work is offloaded to the browser via the DOM, so you don't need to worry about memory leaks or zombie handlers that often arise when naively tying lots of things together using events. No controller that isn't alive and awake in the document will ever receive an event, or be retained in memory after its DOM node is removed. Thus, this.$el.remove() or $('#content').remove() or document.getElementById('foo').innerHTML = '' are perfectly acceptable ways of removing content, as far as freeloader is concerned.

Content loading

Freeloader provides two primary ways to add new content to the DOM.

1. Navigation - Loading whole new pages via app.navigate().
2. Injection - Loading fragments of pages via this.inject() from within controllers.

Navigation

To use navigation, call app.startHistory().

app.startHistory();
app.navigate('/foo?bar=baz', function(err){
  if (err) { ...the connection died... }
  else { ...the request was 200, 404, 500, etc... }
});

Whether your browser supports the history API or not, a call to app.navigate('/foo?bar') always results in the URL bar being updated to /foo?bar. At no point will /#foo?bar or /?bar#foo ever appear in your URL. In the former case, the contents of /foo?bar are fetched via XHR and injected into the page, css/js fetched, and the URL updated using the history API. In the latter case, the browser simply navigates to the new page: location.href = '/foo?bar'. The end result is the same, except modern browsers will be lots faster.

A page's scripts should therefore in no way depend on events such as onload, or otherwise make synchronous assumptions with respect to initial page-load orchestration. This is one of the few things freeloader is opinionated about. Fortunately freeloader's declarative paradigm encourages no such assumptions to begin with, so things should be copacetic.

Besides the speed boost in modern browsers, freeloader's navigation automatically rebinds declared behaviors. This includes existing ones and any ones declared in newly-loaded scripts. This allows you to break apart your scripts on a per-page basis, thus minimizing initial download time.

Injection

this.inject(options, callback);

From within a controller, you may inject() content. The inection API is flexible. The options argument is an argument with a source directive and a target directive. The source is either a string of HTML code, or a URL to retrieve HTML from. The target dictates where to put that HTML. Suppose you have a URL called /posts that returns a DOM tree like this:

/posts?page=1
ul.posts
|--li.post#post1
|--li.post#post2
`--li.post#post3

/posts?page=2
ul.posts
|--li.post#post4
|--li.post#post5
`--li.post#post6

Then suppose you have a controller, with a DOM tree like this:

div
|--ul.posts
|  |--li.post#post1
|  |--li.post#post2
|  `--li.post#post3
`--button.load-more

You can inect like this:

this.inject({
  url: '/posts?page=2 li.post',
  append: 'ul.posts'
}, function(err){
  if (err) { ...content was not injected... }
  else { ...content was injected... }
});

Source directives can be one of these forms:

• url: 'url' (contents of the URL)
• url: 'url selector' (a selection from within the URL)
• html: 'string' (arbitrary chunk of HTML code)
• html: 'element' (one or more DOM or jQuery objects)

Target directives can be one of these forms:

• replace: true (replace this element)
• replace: 'selector' (replace a sub-element)
• before: true (insert before this element)
• before: 'selector' (insert before a sub-element)
• after: true (insert after this element)
• after: 'selector' (insert after a sub-element)
• prepend: true (prepend to this element)
• prepend: 'selector' (prepend to a sub-element)
• append: true (append to this element)
• append: 'selector' (append to a sub-element)

Like the navigation API, the injection API binds behaviors to newly-added content. Thus the second thing freeloader is opionated about: always add new content using freeloader.

Or don't. The only consequence of bypassing freeloader when adding new content is that the new content won't get behavior. But it won't actually break anything.