Class based components with hooks, reactive state and concurrent mode

Try it online! you can experiment with the Owl framework in an online playground.

The Odoo Web Library (Owl) is a smallish (~<20kb gzipped) UI framework built by Odoo for its products. Owl is a modern framework, written in Typescript, taking the best ideas from React and Vue in a simple and consistent way. Owl's main features are:

• a declarative component system,
• a fine grained reactivity system similar to Vue,
• hooks
• fragments
• asynchronous rendering

Owl components are defined with ES6 classes and xml templates, uses an underlying virtual DOM, integrates beautifully with hooks, and the rendering is asynchronous.

Quick links:

• documentation,
• changelog (from Owl 1.x to 2.x),
• playground

Here is a short example to illustrate interactive components:

const { Component, useState, mount, xml } = owl;

class Counter extends Component {
  static template = xml`
    <button t-on-click="() => state.value = state.value + props.increment">
      Click Me! [<t t-esc="state.value"/>]
    </button>`;

  state = useState({ value: 0 });
}

class Root extends Component {
  static template = xml`
    <span>Hello Owl</span>
    <Counter increment="2"/>`;

  static components = { Counter };
}

mount(Root, document.body);

Note that the counter component is made reactive with the useState hook. Also, all examples here uses the xml helper to define inline templates. But this is not mandatory, many applications will load templates separately.

More interesting examples can be found on the playground application.

Are you new to Owl? This is the place to start!

• Tutorial: create a TodoList application
• How to start an Owl project
• How to test Components

• Overview
• App
• Component
• Component Lifecycle
• Concurrency Model
• Dev mode
• Dynamic sub components
• Environment
• Error Handling
• Event Handling
• Form Input Bindings
• Fragments
• Hooks
• Loading Templates
• Mounting a component
• Portal
• Props
• Props Validation
• Reactivity
• Rendering SVG
• Refs
• Slots
• Sub components
• Sub templates
• Templates (Qweb)
• Translations
• Utils

• Notes On Owl Architecture
• Comparison with React/Vue
• Why did Odoo build Owl?
• Changelog (from owl 1.x to 2.x)
• Notes on compiled templates

Owl is available on npm and can be installed with the following command:

npm install @odoo/owl

If you want to use a simple <script> tag, the last release can be downloaded here:

• owl-1.4.10