Alpine JS

Alpine is a rugged, minimal tool for composing behavior directly in your markup. Think of it like jQuery for the modern web, it has an easy to learn syntax that can have you building reactive apps in minutes.

What is Alpine

Alpine is a lightweight JavaScript framework designed to mimic jQuery with modern features like reactive components, all in a package that is 21.9kB minified and 7.1kB gzipped. This is relatively lightweight when compared to jQuery which comes in at 87.6kB minified and 30.4kB minified and gzipped.

Alpine can be used for building any type of web application, it excels at building interfaces and applications where state management is important but might not need a full-scale framework like React or Svelte. If you are interested in what websites use Alpine, you can use this tool to look.

How fast is Alpine

According to this benchmark Alpine performs poorly when compared to many other frameworks and when compared to Vanilla JS. This should be taken lightly, it terms of speed Alpine is not slow at all, we are only talking milliseconds of a performance difference. If you are considering using Alpine speed is defiantly not something you should worry about, but rather the syntax of the framework and how well you can use it.

Scalability

For the scalability of Alpine, I haven't built anything large with it, only a portfolio website. So I don't have any experience to pull from however, after using it I think the main issue you will run into is keeping the state synced between all of the components. I personally would not use Alpine for building an entire web app, I would use it for adding small independent components to an application or to spice up a primarily static site.

Using Alpine

Importing

1<script src="//unpkg.com/alpinejs" defer></script>

Syntax

Here is a example taken from the projects website. It store the state of the button in the div using x-data. x-data is a place to store objects in line and all of the elements children will be able to access the data. The state open is bound to the button element using @click, the code in parenthesis is executed with the variable open being from the x-data. The x-show attribute will show it's contents when the open variable is true.

1<div x-data="{ open: false }">
2    <button @click="open = true">Expand</button>
3 
4    <span x-show="open">
5        Content...
6    </span>
7</div>

Using Alpine with other frameworks

Alpine works well with other frameworks due to its unique syntax. To use it just add the script tag importing it somewhere in you HTML file and Alpine will handle the rest.