To help work with/improve/learn OWL, there are a few extras tools/settings.
- development mode: enable better error reporting for the developer
- a playground application: a space to experiment and learn Owl.
- a benchmarks application: allow comparison with a few common frameworks
The two applications are available in the tools/
folder, and can be accessed
by using a static http server. A simple python
server is available in server.py
. There is also a npm script to start it:
npm run tools
(and its version with a watcher: npm run tools:watch
).
By default, Owl is in production mode, this means that it will try to do its job fast, and skip some expensive operations. However, in some cases, it is convenient to have better information on what is going on, this is the purpose of the dev mode.
Owl has a mode flag, in owl.__info__.mode
. Its default value is prod
, but
it can be set to dev
:
owl.__info__.mode = "dev";
Note that templates compiled with the prod
settings will not be recompiled.
So, changing this setting is best done at startup.
An important job done by the dev
mode is to validate props for each component
creation and update. Also, extra props will cause an error.
The playground is an important application designed to help learning and experimenting with Owl. The last published version of Owl can be tested online.
It is an application similar to jsFiddle
, but specialized for Owl: there are
three tabs (js
, css
and xml
), and a simple button Run
to execute that
code in an iframe.
Note: This is more an internal tool, useful for people working on Owl.
The benchmarks application is a very small application, implemented in different frameworks, and in different versions of Owl. This is a simple internal tool, useful to compare various performance metrics on some tasks.
If you want to have xml
syntax highlighting while using the xml
helper which
helps you define inline templates, there is a VS Code addon Comment tagged template
which, if installed, does exactly that. To enable it, you need to add a comment,
like this:
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// TEMPLATE
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
const TEMPLATE = xml/* xml */ `
<div class="main two-columns">
<Sidebar/>
<Content />
</div>`;
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
// CODE
// -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
class MyComponent extends Component {
static template = TEMPLATE;
static components = { Sidebar, Content };
// rest of component...
}