Are you interested in learning new ways to develop websites and web applications? This article will explore the use of web components and how this modern approach can be used in your new or existing project.
To start, you will need to know what a web component is. As defined by Wikipedia, ‘Web Components are a set of features that provide a standard component model for the Web allowing for encapsulation and interoperability of individual HTML’. In other words, components are a single function or feature that you may use several times in one website or application. Web components are designed to make development easier. It comes in handy if you plan on using the same code several times throughout your project. Instead of building and re-building the same code, you can insert the single component to multiple areas of the site, or in some cases even other projects that you are using. This reduces the time for development and makes maintenance easier.
You can try building components yourself using adequate front-end frameworks like LitElement, Angular, React, and more. Another option is to use components from a third party. If you use such third-party components in your project, you can be saving lots of time and money.
Skhemata offers a library of web components with a wide range of different features which you can see on their pricing page here.
How do web components work?
Advantages
Because web components are completely encapsulated, they make programming, maintaining, and updating code easier. Not to mention you can also test the code easier as well.
Adding components to your project
These web components built by Skhemata are designed to be used in any project or web application. There are a couple of ways that you can embed the component.
First, is the traditional way by installing the package via GitHub. When you sign up for a Skhemata subscription plan, you will be provided access to the GitHub repo. Here you can choose the component that you want to use and install the package into your project. This provides more options for customization capabilities if you want to manipulate the code that is installed in your project.
The second option is to use the widget code. You can copy/paste a small snippet of code to host a component on your application. The widget is served from a CDN that is hosting the widget for you. Even with this option, you can still manipulate the widget via attributes. These attributes that you are adding can change the way that the component will look and function on your site. All you do is add the HTML attribute that is listed in the Skhemata documentation in order to customize it.
What if there is data that needs to be stored or fetched from a database?
There are different kinds of web components that you can use. Some of them don’t require any data computation, whereas others will require an API to store and fetch data. This is where you would be using Skhemata’s universal API. This API is designed to provide endpoints that you can use to grab and store data. It is only available with paid plans, and you will be provided with your own instance when you sign up for the subscription plan.
You will have limited access to the API, as you will not be provided with the back end source code. The design is so that you will not need to update the API since it comes out of the box with all of the endpoints and features that may be needed for the particular component. You can always send requests for updates or anything else that you may want via the contact form.