Composing mixins to make a solid foundation for web components

We've been searching for a way to quickly create web components by composing together pre-defined user interface behaviors, and we have some progress to share on that front.

Web components are a great way to package user interface behavior, but they may not be the most interesting fundamental unit of behavior. There are certain aspects of behavior which you'd like to be able to share across components: accessibility, touch gestures, selection effects, and so on. Those things aren't top-level components in their own right; they're abstract aspects of behavior.

This is something like saying that a chemical molecule is not the fundamental unit of physical behavior — the atoms that make up the molecule are. But you can't generally handle solitary atoms; atoms react and organize themselves into molecules. Likewise, a browser can only handle web components, not abstract behaviors. If we imagine a web component as a molecule, what's the equivalent of an atom? That is, can we decompose a web component into a more fundamental coding unit?

One way to answer this question is to consider a web component as a custom element class. Is there a way we can decompose a class into its fundamental abstract behavioral aspects? The usual way to compose class behavior in JavaScript is with mixins, so perhaps mixins can form the fundamental unit of user interface behavior. That is, we'd like to be able to compose mixins together to create web component classes.

For that purpose, mixins present some challenges:

The simplest approach to JavaScript mixins will overwrite existing on a class, but that's not always desirable. Many web component behaviors want to augment an existing method like createdCallback. That is, the base class' method and the mixin's method should run.
There's no standard JavaScript implementation of mixins. While many user interface frameworks (React, Polymer, etc.) include a mixin strategy, those are intimately tied to the framework itself. You can very quickly write a simple function to copy a mixin onto a class prototype, but that won't accommodate the range of complexity needed to define interesting web component behaviors.

We thought it would be interesting to create a general-purpose mixin architecture that's flexible enough to serve as a foundation for creating web components in plain JavaScript. The initial result of that work is a facility we call Composable.

Composable takes the form of a general-purpose factory for composing classes and objects from mixins. The most interesting part about it is its use of composition rules that let you decide how a mixin's properties and methods should be combined with those of the class you're adding the mixin to.

Composable itself is entirely independent of web components, but we've designed it to serve as a micro-kernel for web component library or framework. An example in the Composable ReadMe illustrates how it could be used to construct web components:

// Create a general-purpose element base class that supports composition.
let ComposableElement = Composable.compose.call(HTMLElement, Composable);

// A mixin that sets an element's text content.
class HelloMixin {
  createdCallback() {
    this.textContent = "Hello, world!";
  }
}

// A sample element class that uses the above mixin.
let HelloElement = ComposableElement.compose(HelloMixin);

// Register the sample element class with the browser.
document.registerElement('hello-element', HelloElement);

// Create an instance of our new element class.
let element = document.createElement('hello-element');
document.body.appendChild(element); // "Hello, world!"

We'll share more on this direction as we go, but for now we wanted to share this as a fundamental building block. Even if you're not creating web components, you could use Composable to give your application or framework a flexible mixin architecture.

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