Dancer.js

This is pretty rough around the edges. Anyway, here's the deal.

Overview

Dancer is a parasitic web framework. It does not attempt to be a web framework in its own right, but rather to piggyback on what some other web framework is doing. It achieves this by using the MutationObserver class to watch when nodes are added or removed from the DOM and when classes are added and removed from an element.

The idea is to use this when you simply do not have access to the execution context of another framework, but you can see the DOM. For example, this is the case when implementing a Chrome plugin.

Lifecycle

init -> attach -> detach -> destroy

init fires when a class is attached to an element
attach fires when a component is attached to the DOM
detach fires when a component is removed from the DOM
destroy fires when a class is removed from an element

These lifecycle events do not receive arguments. this is set to the Dancer object. If you use es6 you should take care to use function(){} syntax and not ()=>{} syntax as this will bind this to the wrong value.

init and attach fire in order if a new element is attached with a class. detach and destroy fire in order if a class is removed from an attached component.

Dancer matches on classes for the moment. You must register a component for each class and no DOM node should have two of these classes at the same time. You can use the lifecycle methods to react when the underlying web app creates something.

Other callbacks

attribute fires with the name of an attribute and its new value, if an attribute is changed.

The class attribute is currently filtered out, as is dancerid.

Watching a subtree

Dancer.observe(document.body);

Adding a component

Dancer.register("honk", {
  attach: function() { this.element.style.backgroundColor = "green"; },
  detach: function() { this.element.style.backgroundColor = "initial"; },
  honk: function() { console.log("honk!"); },
});

Manipulating your object

var element = document.querySelector(".honk");
var honk = Dancer.for(element);
honk.honk();

zipcode / dancer