9. Mockup and Alternatives

Mockup was created at a time when no alternatives were in sight. But nowadays, with the explosion of JavaScript Frameworks, there are plenty of them.

Web Components

Web Components are a W3C draft and will likely gain a lot of momentum once browsers better support it. Web components can already be used by using Google’s Polymer or Mozilla’s X-Tags libraries. The only drawback is that those libraries only work for recent browser generations.

When Web Components gather more momentum, they will make Mockup obsolete. It’s hard to say when this will happen. Maybe in one or two years? However, Mockup can probably be changed to use Web Components, so there will be an upgrade path.

Angular JS Directives

Angular JS also provides a framework to build reusable components. Actually, everything DOM related is implemented as a directive (TODO: PROOF). The Angular JS way of defining directives feels a lot like defining patterns in Mockup. Of course, Angular JS grew so much that Mockup has a hard time to compete with it. However, Angular JS provides a lot more than Mockup and for projects who do not want to use this fully fledged, all inclusive Framework but need something to manage JavaScript snippets of widgets, Mockup is a good choice.