Are you a developer that builds web applications or websites frequently? If so, you may find that you are re-building and maintaining your custom code.
Using web components is not a new practice with today’s development workflows. This doesn’t mean, however, that there isn’t new technology being developed that can change your overall way to build and maintain web applications. In this article, we are going to explore the use of smart web components for web applications.
To start, we need to understand what a component is/does. When developing web applications you may use a component within your application to build out a feature. As defined by Wikipedia, “Web Components are a set of features that provide a standard component model for the Web, allowing for encapsulation and interoperability of individual HTML elements”.
In other words, components are encapsulated and reusable in their nature to help you build features in your website or web application. They can be used by copying/pasting HTML code into your webpage. In today’s world of development, there are several libraries that provide web components, one major library which has been developed by Google is Polymer.
Why is this important for web application development?
If you are someone who builds web applications, you will know that there are many aspects to building and maintaining new features. It takes time to test the feature using multiple browsers, unit tests, responsiveness, etc. You will then finish the new feature just to find out that it breaks once you are using a different browser or there is an upgrade in an OS or mobile device screen size. This can be quite a cumbersome process when there are so many other aspects to an application. Such issues can be avoided, however, when using the right components.
Advantages of using components
Components can allow you to build a feature really fast using existing code, without any maintenance. The existing code is typically provided via HTML so that you can add it to the web page.
Instead of spending countless hours on the feature, you can let the component provider build, test, and maintain the code that you want to use for the feature on your application(s).
Another advantage is reusability. You may find that you are rebuilding many of the same features on an application. Using components, there is no need to rebuild, you can just copy it into the appropriate area of your application. So maybe you are using the component for one application, but you are working on a different application that will need the same component added to it.
What if the code is built with a different programming language than my web application?
No need to worry, at the beginning of the article we mention that the components are encapsulated. This means that you can use the component with any web programming language. With simple HTML code that you can copy/paste onto your webpage, you can use the component because it is fully isolated, even if it’s not using the same programming language as your web application.
Where can I find components to use for my project?
If you want to improve your development workflow and use web components in your application, one option is to use Skhemata. You can choose from a library of components. Included in the library, some are free, while others are paid.
Do the components use an API?
Yes, the Skhemata components use a universal API and provide documentation for it.
How do you modify the components?
You can easily modify the functionality and look of the components using different attributes. This is all documented for each component. You can play with the code by using different attributes before adding it to your application so that the functionality and look is perfect for your application.
As you can see, there are many advantages of using such components. Overall, they will provide a better development workflow while reducing time spent developing and maintaining new features/code.