Previously, components would automatically call useState on their props, so that changes deeply within props would automatically cause the component to be rendered. This can be useful when passing a piece of state to children or descendants. One problem with this is that all props implicitly become reactive, even if the object that was passed as a props was not. The problem with that being that since the original object is not reactive, any change made by the parent will not go through the reactivity system and the children won't be notified of the change, in essence, this reactive object is essentially useless, while having a real cost: traversing reactive objects creates more reactive objects, and those objects are all proxies. This is expensive for basically no benefit, while also making it more difficult to debug code that involves those objects. This commit fixes that by only calling useState on objects that are already reactive, allowing the usecase described in the first paragraph without the drawbacks described in the second.
🦉 Owl Framework 🦉
Class based components with hooks, reactive state and concurrent mode
Try it online! you can experiment with the Owl framework in an online playground.
Project Overview
The Odoo Web Library (Owl) is a smallish (~<20kb gzipped) UI framework built by Odoo for its products. Owl is a modern framework, written in Typescript, taking the best ideas from React and Vue in a simple and consistent way. Owl's main features are:
- a declarative component system,
- a fine grained reactivity system similar to Vue,
- hooks
- fragments
- asynchronous rendering
Owl components are defined with ES6 classes and xml templates, uses an underlying virtual DOM, integrates beautifully with hooks, and the rendering is asynchronous.
Quick links:
- documentation,
- changelog (from Owl 1.x to 2.x),
- playground
Example
Here is a short example to illustrate interactive components:
const { Component, useState, mount, xml } = owl;
class Counter extends Component {
static template = xml`
<button t-on-click="() => state.value = state.value + props.increment">
Click Me! [<t t-esc="state.value"/>]
</button>`;
state = useState({ value: 0 });
}
class Root extends Component {
static template = xml`
<span>Hello Owl</span>
<Counter increment="2"/>`;
static components = { Counter };
}
mount(Root, document.body);
Note that the counter component is made reactive with the useState hook.
Also, all examples here uses the xml helper to define inline templates.
But this is not mandatory, many applications will load templates separately.
More interesting examples can be found on the playground application.
Documentation
Learning Owl
Are you new to Owl? This is the place to start!
Reference
- Overview
- App
- Component
- Component Lifecycle
- Concurrency Model
- Dev mode
- Dynamic sub components
- Environment
- Error Handling
- Event Handling
- Form Input Bindings
- Fragments
- Hooks
- Loading Templates
- Mounting a component
- Portal
- Props
- Props Validation
- Reactivity
- Rendering SVG
- Refs
- Slots
- Sub components
- Sub templates
- Templates (Qweb)
- Translations
- Utils
Other Topics
- Notes On Owl Architecture
- Comparison with React/Vue
- Why did Odoo build Owl?
- Changelog (from owl 1.x to 2.x)
- Notes on compiled templates
Installing Owl
Owl is available on npm and can be installed with the following command:
npm install @odoo/owl
If you want to use a simple <script> tag, the last release can be downloaded here: