Draft of BioJS 3: Web components

<img width="50%" alt="Web components logo" src="http://webcomponents.org/img/logo.svg" />

Yeah, BioJS is moving forward to have every module as Web Component with Custom Elements!

As an overview you might want to watch A jump through web wormholes by @greenify that givens an introduction why Web Components are the future for BioJS.

What are Web Components?

"Web Components are a set of standards currently being produced by Google engineers as a W3C specification that allow for the creation of reusable widgets or components in web documents and web applications. The intention behind them is to bring component-based software engineering to the World Wide Web." (Wikipedia)

Why Web Components?

• automatic encapsulation thanks to the shadow DOM (no more problems with components modifying your site, id conflicts, css conflicts or problems to create multiple instances of a components)
• Custom DOM Elements (new HTML elements e.g. just for biological data)

Everyone is familiar with HTML and can add a <button> DOM element to their website. Why not let them add a <biojs-msa> element?

Imagine to include an multiple sequence alignment into your website with a short HTML snippet like this:

<biojs-msa>
  <biojs-io-fasta url="./Q7T2N8.fasta" />
</biojs-msa>

Why now?

• The first official release of Polymer (version 1.0) was at this year's Google I/O (2015-05-29)
• The Polymer project worked hard to reduce the Web Component polyfill to a lightweight shim
• Supported in Chrome since version 36
• Web components will be the future!

Not convinced yet?

Have a look at the presentations listed at webcomponents.org - especially:

• Polymer and modern web APIs: In production at Google scale at this year'S Google I/O by the Polymer dev team
• Why you should be using Web Components now. And how by Phil Leggetter (@leggetter)
• Componentize The Web: Back To The Browser! by Addy Osmani (@addyosmani)
• Polymer and Web Components change everything you know about Web development by Eric Bidelman (@ebidel)
• A future called Web Components by Zeno Rocha (@zenorocha)

What is the roadmap?

Our roadmap is work in progress, please look at our github wiki.

How to help?

Currently there is development and brainstorming is happening here at github

• If you have an idea, proposal -> don’t hesitate to open an issue
• IF you want to port your (or a) component to polymer -> go for it & discuss your progress with us here :)
• Have a look at our roadmap (at the wiki) & get inspired
• If you haven't found a task yet, browse through the open issues or ping us on gitter