Starbeam is Universal Reactivity
Starbeam is a library that allows you to write reactive code in a framework agnostic way. This means that you can write your code once, and use it with any framework that has a Starbeam renderer.
At the moment, Starbeam has renderers for React and Preact. We've also built a proof of concept renderer for Svelte and we're working on a Vue renderer.
What is Universal Reactivity?
Starbeam is a universal reactivity system. If you're familiar with React hooks, you can think of Starbeam as a way of writing universal hooks.
Unlike a lot of other reactivity libraries, Starbeam's reactivity system goes beyond reactive data.
Starbeam provides four universal building blocks:
- Reactive data: simple values, computed values, and reactive versions of JavaScript's built-in data structures (added in 0.5).
- Reactive resources: reactive values with lifecycle. You can use these to create reactive data sources, like a WebSocket connection or a fetch request (added in 0.6).
- Reactive services: reactive application state. Services are resources that are set up once per app instance, and cleaned up when the application root is unmounted. You can use these to create reactive data sources that are shared across components without relying on module-level state and mocking (added in 0.8).
- Reactive modifiers: reactive DOM modifiers. You can use these to define DOM behavior that is based on reactive data, and whose setup and cleanup behavior is tied to an element in the DOM (prototyped in the repo, coming in 0.10).
When you write code using these universal building blocks, you use the Starbeam libraries and don't reference any specific framework.
Starbeam is expressive enough to allow you to write code that builds on powerful framework features such as React's concurrent APIs and Preact's signals, but you don't need to know about the details of these features to use them.
When we say that Starbeam is a universal reactivity framework, we don't mean that Starbeam is a lowest-common-denominator library.
Instead, we jump through hoops to find streamlined APIs that are expressive enough to take advantage of advanced framework features and ergonomic enough to use in any framework environment so you don't have to.