Beedle is a tiny library to help you manage state across your application. Inspired by great libraries like Vuex and Redux, Beedle creates a central store that enables you predictably control and cascade state across your application.
This library was initially created as a prototype for this article on CSS-Tricks, where you learn how to build a state management system from scratch with Vanilla JavaScript.
Beedle creates a pattern where a single source of truth, the 'Application State' cascades state across your app in a predictable fashion. To modify state, a set flow of actions
and mutations
help create a traceable data-flow that makes things a little easier to debug.
Using a Pub/Sub pattern which notifies anything that is subscribed to changes, a fully reactive front-end can be acheived with a few kilobytes of vanilla JavaScript.
As the diagram above shows, a simple, predictable flow is created by pushing data into an action
which subsequently calls one or more mutations
. Only the mutation
can modify state, which helps with keeping track of changes.
Continue reading the documentation
Beedle is inspired by libraries like Redux, but certainly isn't designed to replace it. Beedle is aimed more at tiny little applications or where a development team might be looking to create the smallest possible footprint with their JavaScript.
Beedle is intended to be tiny, so the largest that the uncompressed size will ever get to is 5kb.
Beedle is aimed at browsers that support ES6 by default. It also uses a Proxy to monitor state, so anything that supports Proxy will support Beedle.
You could use the Proxy polyfill to support more browsers.
Most major browsers will support Beedle with no issues.
You can pull Beedle down via npm or take a zip of this repository. The rest of this guide assumes you've used npm.
Run npm install beedle
in your project directory.
First up, import it into your JavaScript:
import Store from 'beedle';
Once you've got that you should create some actions
, mutations
and some initial state:
const actions = {
saySomething(context, payload) {
context.commit('setMessage', payload);
}
};
const mutations = {
setMessage(state, payload) {
state.message = payload;
return state;
}
};
const initialState = {
message: 'Hello, world'
};
Once you've got those setup, you can create a Store
instance like this:
const storeInstance = new Store({
actions,
mutations,
initialState
});
Let's say you've got a text box that you type a message into. When the content is changed, it could dispatch a new message to your store:
// Grab the textearea and dispatch the action on 'input'
const textElement = document.querySelector('textarea');
textElement.addEventListener('input', () => {
// Dispatch the action, which will subsequently pass this message to the mutation
// which in turn, updates the store's state
storeInstance.dispatch('saySomething', textElement.value.trim());
});
Beedle uses the Pub/Sub pattern to transmit changes. Let's attach the message to a DOM element:
// Grab the text element and attach it to the stateChange event
const messageElement = document.querySelector('.js-message-element');
// This fires every time the state updates
storeInstance.subscribe(state => {
messageElement.innerText = state.message;
});
Head over to the basic demo to see this in action 🚀
Thanks to Eli Fitch for giving me the idea to call this Beedle. This matches my preference to call my little projects names based on Zelda. Here's Beedle from Zelda.
Thanks to the incredible people who maintain projects such as Redux, Vuex and MobX et. al. Thanks for making our lives easier and for inspiring this project.