The release of Component 0.15.0 adds an extremely simple but crucial feature: dropping prefixes for globally require()-d components.
For those of you who are not familiar Component uses GitHub as its primary registry, thus we do not need to fight over names - there are no collisions. Prior to this release if you were to require() a component from outside another you would have to add the username prefix such as require('visionmedia-superagent'). This restriction has been lifed and a simple call to require('superagent') will do.
This simple change makes Component a much better candidate for using Components within existing applications or in tandem with other frameworks such as Backbone or AngularJS. The downside of this approach of course is that the rest of your application remains using globals instead of self-contained modules.
First you'll want to install component(1), if you don't have node installed view the instructions here, otherwise execute:
$ npm install -g component
To get started create a new directory, and place a file named index.html within it, containing a simple list of pets:
<html>
<head>
<title>Component example</title>
<style>
body {
font: 14px Helvetica;
padding: 50px;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Component example</h1>
<p>Simple example of using component with script tags for integration with existing frameworks.</p>
<ul id="pets">
<li data-species="cat" data-age="3">Manny</li>
<li data-species="cat" data-age="3">Luna</li>
<li data-species="ferret" data-age="3">Tobi</li>
<li data-species="ferret" data-age="2">Loki</li>
<li data-species="ferret" data-age="6">Jane</li>
</ul>
</body>
</html>As a contrived example we'll iterate the pet dom nodes and add a paragraph displaying the oldest ferret. To get started installing components create a ./component.json file with two dependencies, the first is enumerable which we'll use to filter the elements, and dom which is effectively a small jQuery dom manipulation replacement which itself is comprised of several smaller logical modules.
{
"name": "myapp",
"dependencies": {
"component/enumerable": "0.3.1",
"component/dom": "0.6.0"
}
}Now install the components:
$ component install
install : component/[email protected]
install : component/[email protected]
install : component/to-function@master
install : component/type@master
install : component/event@master
install : component/delegate@master
install : component/indexof@master
install : component/domify@master
install : component/classes@master
install : component/css@master
install : component/sort@master
install : component/value@master
install : component/query@master
install : component/matches-selector@master
install : component/event@master
install : component/indexof@master
complete : component/to-function
...
As you can see component(1) resolves and installs all of the dependencies much like any other package manager. The next thing we need to do is produce a build of the CSS and JavaScript, in this case just JavaScript:
$ component build
This produces the ./build directory containing assets, build.css, and build.js. Now all you have to do to integrate components into your application is add a <script src="build/build.js"> tag. Add the following to the bottom of your <body> tag to filter the pets:
<script src="build/build.js"></script>
<script>
var dom = require('dom')
var list = require('enumerable')
var pets = list(dom('#pets > li'))
var name = pets
.select('.attr("data-species") == "ferret"')
.select('.attr("data-age") > 4')
.map('text()')
.first()
dom('<p>')
.text('The oldest ferret is ' + name)
.appendTo('body')
</script>For the full source of this example view the component/script-tag-example repository. To browse over 850 fantastic components visit component.io, and for more development information view the component/component repository.