Link to the presentation

VoilaJS is a SAML ( Syntactically awesome markup language ) which boosts your static front-end development process by allowing you to write your HTML in the form of modules, very similar to React but, with a much less steeper learning curve! ( All you need to know is to write JSON and that's easy! 😛)

The best part is HTML just became programmable 😛 !! But how ?

What we thought was, CSS has it's programmable counter-part ( SASS ) why not HTML ? Guess what, now it has one, we call it SAML ( full form above ).

Just like other front-end frameworks, we too have out our own CLI to bootstrap your starter code.

Installation :

$ npm i -g voila-cmd

Next, we need to initialize a project, it's simple!

$ voila init

This generates a voila.json file in your project directory and also a config.js file where you write all your HTML logic, sound's weird saying that doesn't it! 😛

{
  title: 'forms',
  description: 'forms',
  css: 'Bootstrap',
  entry: 'index.html',
  author: '',
  License: 'ISC',
  git: false,
  config: 'config.js'
}

You can also add git repository to your project, voila automatically initializes a empty git repository with the needed files in .gitignore.

$ cd directory

exports.root = [
  {
    div: [
      {
        id: 'root',
        //ADD YOUR ELEMENTS HERE
        div: [
          {
            class: 'col-md-3'
          }
        ],
        h1: [
          {
            class: 'title1',
            value: 'first h1'
          },
          {
            class: 'title2',
            value: 'second h1'
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
]

Above, is an example of a simple configuration, ( configurations need to be written in the JSON format ).

This JSON gets compiled to the HTML below:

<root >
  <div id="root" >
    <div class="col-md-3" >  </div>

    <h1 class="title1" > first h1 </h1>

    <h1 class="title2" > second h1 </h1>
  </div>
</root>

Once, you've written your own configuration, voila needs to parse and compile it into HTML, to do that run...

$ voila load

We have built our own parser that parses the JSON configurations and converts them into it's equivalent HTML syntax.

This HTML is can be viewed by starting the server, just run ...

$ voila start

Writing HTML in Component Style :

• config.js

const { main } = require('./components/main');
const { navbar } = require('./components/navbar');

let Main = main();
let Navbar = navbar();

exports.root = [
  {
    div: [
      {
        id: 'root',
        //ADD YOUR ELEMENTS HERE
        Navbar,
        Main
      }
    ]
  }
]

• main.js

module.exports.main = () => {
  return [
    {
      class: 'container',
      div: [
        {
          class: 'starter-template',
          h1: [
            {
              value: 'Bootstrap starter template'
            }
          ],
          p: [
            {
              class: 'lead',
              value: 'Use this document as a way to quickly start any new project.<br> All you get is this text and a mostly barebones HTML document.'
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

• navbar.js

module.exports.navbar = () => {
  return [
    {
      class: 'navbar navbar-expand-md navbar-dark bg-dark fixed-top',
      a: [
        {
          class: 'navbar-brand',
          value: 'Logo'
        }
      ],
      button: [
        {
          class: 'navbar-toggler',
          type: 'button',
          span: [
            {
              class: 'navbar-toggler-icon',
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Examples :

We have added 2 examples one for Bootstrap and other for Materialize :

$ git clone this repository / download zip

$ cd example

$ voila start

View your static webpage server on http://localhost:(port)