Stencil: A Compiler for Web Components and PWAs

npm init stencil

Stencil is a simple compiler for generating Web Components and static site generated progressive web apps (PWA). Stencil was built by the Ionic team for its next generation of performant mobile and desktop Web Components.

Stencil combines the best concepts of the most popular frontend frameworks into a compile-time rather than run-time tool. It takes TypeScript, JSX, an asynchronous rendering pipeline to ensure smooth running animations, lazy-loading out of the box, and generates 100% standards-based Web Components that run on both modern browsers and legacy browsers.

Stencil components are just Web Components, so they work in any major framework or with no framework at all. In many cases, Stencil can be used as a drop in replacement for traditional frontend frameworks given the capabilities now available in the browser, though using it as such is certainly not required.

Stencil also enables a number of key capabilities on top of Web Components, in particular Server Side Rendering (SSR) without the need to run a headless browser, pre-rendering, and objects-as-properties (instead of just strings).

Note: Stencil and Ionic Framework are completely independent projects. Stencil does not prescribe any specific UI framework, but Ionic Framework is the largest user of Stencil (today!)

Why Stencil?

Stencil is a new approach to a popular idea: building fast and feature-rich apps in the browser. Stencil was created to take advantage of major new capabilities available natively in the browser, such as Custom Elements v1, enabling developers to ship far less code and build faster apps that are compatible with any and all frameworks.

Stencil is also a solution to organizations and library authors struggling to build reusable components across a diverse spectrum of frontend frameworks, each with their own component system. Stencil components work in React, Vue, Angular and Ember, as well as they work with jQuery or with no framework at all, because they are just plain HTML elements.

Compared to using Custom Elements directly, inside of every Stencil component is an efficient JSX rendering system, asynchronous rendering pipeline to prevent jank, and more. This makes Stencil components more performant while maintaining full compatibility with plain Custom Elements. Think of Stencil as creating pre-baked Custom Elements as if you wrote in those features yourself.

Getting Started

To create a new project using an interactive cli, run:

npm init stencil

To start developing your new Stencil project, run:

npm start

Creating components

Stencil components are TypeScript classes with decorator metadata. The decorators themselves are purely build-time annotations so the compiler can read metadata about each component, and removed entirely for smaller efficient components.

Create new components by creating files with a .tsx extension, such as my-component.tsx, and place them in src/components.

import { Component, Prop, h } from '@stencil/core';

@Component({
  tag: 'my-component',
  styleUrl: 'my-component.css'
})
export class MyComponent {

  @Prop() first: string;

  @Prop() last: string;

  render() {
    return (
      <div>
        Hello, my name is {this.first} {this.last}
      </div>
    );
  }
}

Note: the .tsx extension is required, as this is the standard for TypeScript classes that use JSX.

To use this component, just use it like any other HTML element:

<my-component first="Stencil" last="JS"></my-component>

API

The API for stencil closely mirrors the API for Custom Elements v1.

Components

| Decorator | Description | | -------------- | --- | | @Component() | Indicate a class is a Stencil component. | | | | | @Prop() | Creates a property that will exist on the element and be data-bound to this component. | | @State() | Creates a local state variable that will not be placed on the element. | | @Method() | Expose specific methods to be publicly accessible. |

Why "Stencil?"

A Stencil is a tool artists use for drawing perfect shapes easily. We want Stencil to be a similar tool for web developers: a tool that helps web developers build powerful Web Components and apps that use them, but without creating non-standard runtime requirements.

Stencil is a tool developers use to create Web Components with some powerful features baked in, but it gets out of the way at runtime.

• Using Web Components in Ionic - Polymer Summit
• Stencil: A built-time approach to the web - JSConf EU
• Architecting A Component Compiler - dotJS

Related

• Stencil Documentation
• Stencil Worldwide Slack
• Ionic
• Ionic Worldwide Slack
• Ionicons
• Capacitor

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BrowserStack Open-Source Program

License

• MIT