When comparing Ractive.js vs Metayota HTML Engine, the Slant community recommends Metayota HTML Engine for most people. In the question“What are the best Angular.js alternatives?” Metayota HTML Engine is ranked 12th while Ractive.js is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Metayota HTML Engine is:
The framework is only approx. 10 kilobytes in size and 2k lines of code. The custom tags can be lazy-loaded or preloaded. The rendering process is fast and selective, so only updated elements are rendered.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Supports a true templating language
Ractive fully supports a templating language. To be more precise, views are written with a variant of Mustache, which is also extended to support inline JavaScript expressions. Soon it will be able to support other templating languages.
Pro Makes it possible to handle user interaction in a readable, declarative fashion
Ractive has a concept of proxy events, which translate a user action (e.g. a mouseclick) defined via an event directive into an intention (e.g. 'select this option'). This allows you to handle user interaction in a readable, declarative fashion.on-click='activate'
with arguments:on-click = 'activate: {{a}}, {{b}}'
It's activate
(and not click
, nor your function name) that is the name of the handler event that will be fired for any registered handlers created viaractive.on('activate', your_handler)
ractive.on('activate', your_another_handler)
Of course, Ractive also supports method calls like on-click='toggle(foo
)'
Pro Two-way binding configuration
Two-way binding can be turned off by those that are concerned it may be a source of bugs.
Pro Step by step tutorial
They have a great interactive tutorial which makes the learning process easy peasy. You will get into it within a couple of minutes.
Pro Virtual DOM
Instead of relying on the DOM, Ractive implements a virtual DOM from scratch, allowing it to calculate precisely what needs to be patched during the next screen refresh. This is orders of magnitude faster than fiddling with the DOM itself.
Pro Fast and leightweight
The framework is only approx. 10 kilobytes in size and 2k lines of code. The custom tags can be lazy-loaded or preloaded. The rendering process is fast and selective, so only updated elements are rendered.
Pro IDE for progamming
Metayota offers an IDE for programming or designing tags for this framework. There is no programming knowledge needed and all tags can be tested instantly.
Pro Clean Code / Clean HTML
Readable, easy to maintain and clean code. The Metayota HTML Engine does not add any non-standard HTML elements to your code or any unintended tags or attributes. The HTML can be written, like it was intended by the designer. Only elements which are finished with rendering are added to the DOM (no flickering).
Cons
Con Ractive's two way binding can be a source of bugs
Two-way data-binding means that a HTML element in the view and an Ractive model are binded, and when one of them is changed so is the other. One-way data-binding for example does not change the model when the HTML element is changed.
This is a rather controversial subject and many developers consider two-way data binding an anti-pattern and something that is useless in complex applications because it's very easy to create complex situations by using it and being unable to debug them easily or understand what's happening by just looking at the code.
However, this is the default behaviour which can be changed to have one-way data binding.