Since the past few chapters took a look at the modern web and the APIs available to us, we are now going to take a practical example of those same APIs in action. There has been quite a bit of development in web frameworks that create a kind of runtime associated with them. This runtime can be almost all attributed to a Virtual DOM (VDOM) and a state system. When these two things are interconnected, we are able to create rich and reactive frontend. Examples of these frameworks are React, Vue, and Angular.
But what happens if we got rid of the VDOM and runtime concept and somehow compiled all of this code down to vanilla JavaScript and web API calls? This is what the creators of the Svelte framework had in mind: to utilize what we have in the browser instead of creating our own version of the browser (this is an obvious oversimplification, but it does not stretch the truth too much). In this chapter, we will take a look a Svelte and how it achieves some of this magic, along with a few examples of applications written in this framework. This should give a good understanding of Svelte and the runtime-less frameworks that are out there and how they could potentially speed up our application runtime speed.
The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:
- A framework for pure speed
- Build the basics – a Todo application
- Getting fancier – basic weather application