The DevFest Nantes 2019 presentation of Building Complex Applications with Web Components is probably one of the most important to Lit developers; everyone references Justin Fagnani's presentation of how to do routing, lazy loading, and context management. The presentation includes a section on dependency injection: how an object can request its dependencies from other components higher up in the DOM tree.

One of the problems I have with the code as presented is that it fails to handle the case where the dependency supplier must perform some asynchronous work before sending the dependency to the requester. I'll show you how to extend the example to handle that, and what capabilities that extension gives you.

It's commonplace in Web Components to use custom events. The custom event type is an inheritor of the Event class, but it includes a new field, detail: any, that allows you to attach data to the Event, which is useful for passing data up to the listener, right?

Wrong. It's a trap. You could, theoretically, inherit from CustomEvent and narrow the content of detail to what you specifically want, and I've seen lots of code where people do exactly that.

But there's a better way: just inherit from Event. Skip the CustomEvent class and just create your own events. I'll show you how.

This blog post teaches an elegant way to isolate a complex Lit ContextProvider object in a ReactiveController, so you can compose it into multiple applications, and you can compose multiple different contexts into one application, without duplicate code or visual clutter. We tap into the host's lifecycle to correctly manage creating and populating and providing event listeners to handle context update requests.

It also shows how to write a Mixin to access that context without having to spam your entire app with context changes or force your developers to hand-write consumer code.

As a bonus, it includes both an elegant way to declare a base class with multiple mixins, and a nifty trick for creating truly private fieldnames without the Private Fieldname syntax, because the latter has a known performance problem.

In my new job, I've been working a lot with an existing codebase that uses web components (via Lit) for the HTML and Patternfly for the CSS, and I've discovered that Patternfly, as well as other CSS Libraries such as Tailwind or Bootstrap, are awkward fits for developing web components. You usually end up importing too much per component or sacrificing code readability on the altar of code size.

Let me give you an example:

React is the number one most popular web application development framework, hands down, with twice the user base of its next competitor, Angular. My framework of choice is LitElement, which doesn't even appear on some of these charts.

According to Stack Overflow, 55% of developer "admire" Lit, and less than 1% get to work in it. I, fortunately, get to work in Lit, but after four years of React experience I've discovered that Lit is so very different from React, Angular, and the rest that it takes a heavy mental shift to work in it.

I work professionally on a medium-sized web application written in Lit that orchestrates and administers single-sign-on for small-to-medium businesses. I really like Lit, and working on this thing has been like being thrown into the deep end of the pool. There are two aspects of Lit that make it really different from the others and can make it hard for some developers to make the mental shift.