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Web Development

Model-driven live-editable web components in pure JavaScript.


Check out the demo before anything (but note that it may be broken in some days until the first stable version is released.)

Also see the TODO list because this is still in active development.

This library is designed for data-dense business-type apps with a focus on data entry and data navigation.

These types of apps have higher information density, higher signal-to-noise ratio, faster loading times and lower operational latencies than the usual consumer-centric web-apps, and as such, tend to favor tabbed and split-pane layouts over newspaper-type layouts, optimize for keyboard navigation, and are generally designed for an office setting with a big screen, a chair, a keyboard and a mouse (“keyboard & mouse”-first apps).

So what this means is: none of that responsive stuff (except for forms for which you can define different grid layouts based on screen width), keyboard is king, no touchy the screen, and no megabytes of polyfills to implement half a browser because you want to squeeze that last drop of the market or deliver a few more ads.


The highlight of the library is the virtual grid widget which can load, scroll, sort and filter 100K items instantly on any modern computer (or phone), can act as a tree-grid or as a vertical grid, has inline editing, drag & drop moving of columns and rows and tons of other features (not to mention, far, far less code than any js library of similar capabilities, if you’re into that sort of thing).

Accompanying that there’s a listbox widget which is not virtual (so it can’t hold as many items as the grid efficiently), not out-of-the-box editable, but the items can be custom-rendered to variable widths and heights and you can still have drag & drop moving, multiple selection, sorting, etc.

Next there’s an assortment of single-value input widgets to use for forms. You tie these up to a navigation component (grid or listbox) and they show and edit the data at whatever the focused row is on that component.

Then there’s a bunch of layouting widgets like pagelist, splitter and a css-grid. The beauty with these is that you can Ctrl+(Shift+)click on any of those and they temporarily enter a “design mode” which allows you to tweak the layout of your application while it’s running. Press Esc or click outside and it goes back to normal mode. The widgets include full built-in customizable (de)serialization to help with making those changes persistent. There’s also an object inspector and a widget tree, which together make up a fully functional UI designer built right into your living app, so you can fully design your app while it’s running.

All navigation widgets as well as the single-value widgets are model-driven (we used to call these data-driven way back when wearing a t-shirt over a long sleeve was cool). The nav widget holds the data, and one or more value widgets are then bound to the nav widget so changes made on a cell by one widget are reflected instantly in other widgets (aka 2-way binding). The nav widget then gathers the changes made to one or more rows/cells and can push them to a server (aka 3-way binding).

I’m also working on a WebGL2-based 3D model editor [x-modeleditor] which comes with its own WebGL2 wrapper, 3D math lib and shaders. I hope to finish it all this year (2021). This will be kept open-source with a public domain license forever but it will be developed as part of a commercial product.

Browser Compatibility

This will probably only work on desktop Firefox and Chrome/Edge for the forseeable future. Something might be done for Safari (if it doesn’t catch up all by itself, or better yet, dies and spares us all some grief) and maybe mobile Chrome and Firefox too. Anything else is out.


To install the library you need docker, kubernetes, webpack, redis, memcached (because RAM is cheap) four medium AWS instances and an Apple developer account. Look, Jesus F Crist it’s just a bunch of .js files and one big .css file. Load them as they are, dependencies first, using simple html tags.

The dependencies are glue.js and divs.js (included).

glue.js extends JavaScript with basic routines similar to glue from Lua.

divs.js is a tiny jQuery-like library for DOM manipulation.

Additionally, [x-modeleditor] is implemented in x-modeleditor.js, x-model3.js and depends on 3d.js, gl.js, gl-renderer.js and earcut.js (also included).

3d.js is a fast 3D math library for WebGL.

gl.js is a tiny WebGL2 wrapper.

earcut.js is the polygon triangulation library from mapbox.


Even though they’re web components, the widgets don’t use shadow DOMs so both their sub-elements and their styling are up for grabs. All widgets get the .x-widget class that you can set global styling like a custom font to, without disturbing your other styles.


Strings are never rendered directly as HTML to avoid accidentally creating XSS holes. For formatting rich text safely use templates (mustache.js from webb is a good candidate and it also has a server-side Lua implementation).

Web developers beware

If you’re a web developer (as opposed to say, a programmer), you might want to stay away from this library. This library’s author doesn’t have much respect for “design patterns”, “best practices”, “code smells” and other such thinking-avoidance mechanisms often employed by web developers. If you’re still not sure, here’s a list to test the limits of your dogmatism see how unprofessional I am:

  • this lib pollutes the global namespace like it’s London 1858.
  • this lib extends built-in classes with new methods.
  • this lib only uses === when it’s actually necessary.
  • this lib uses both var and let as needed.
  • this lib uses <table> for layouting. Tables, man. For layouting.
  • this lib uses snake case instead of hungarian notation.
  • this lib wraps instantiations with new into plain functions.
  • this lib does not even quote html attributes. why are you still reading?
  • this lib uses synchronous ajax requests that some smart-ass condescending w3c people found that it’s in our best interest to deprecate.
  • this lib uses a deployment system whereby you open up your file explorer and then you copy-paste a bunch of .css and .js files to your goddam www folder.
  • this lib was not written by Google so it must have a lot of security vulnerabilities.
  • this libs uses tabs, not spaces.
  • look, it’s not even a framework, it’s a library. don’t you wanna use a framework?

Last updated: 57 days ago | Edit on GitHub

Pkg type:Lua
Version: 7e58766
Last commit:
License: Public Domain

Requires: none

Required by: none