BIO Component Standard

Many modern component frameworks such as React, Angular or Vue.js use the component composition paradigm in order to build bigger and more complex components from many tiny reusable components. This is great, but mostly the finished product is just one more stand-alone complex component with its own “proprietary” API added to the vast ecosystem of each of these component frameworks. But then, many of these custom build or off-the shelf components needs to be wired together into a working application. And because all these components are built independently form each other, by different developers or even teams, and all have completely separated “proprietary” API ‘s, the wiring and API alignment of all these different components becomes unnecessarily complex. I think we could do better that this if one would establish a standardized API for reusable components.

For example, in the Redux ecosystem a successful attempt has been made to define an open standard for dispatching Actions. We know and use it today as the Flux Standard Action or FSA. A similar approach could be adopted to define the BIO Component Standard.

This way, to enable flexible component pluggability at each component level, it is useful to define an open component standard, which defines the contract API for component substitution at each component level we have defined earlier. Components that are BIO compatible should implement the BIO Component Standard interface.

Each BIO Component level has its own BIO Component Standard interface definition. This way BIO Components can be interchanged without modification at each level of the UI. This same principle is also at work in the famous 7-layer OSI-model, the open data communication reference model used in all modern network protocols and topologies.

Whereas traditional component composition is used to compose existing reusable generic components into new and bigger specialized components, The BIO Component Standard facilitates and standardizes component composition at the Application level. In a way the BIO Component Standard makes it possible to transform the specialized components into generic ones again, and make them fit for composition and reuse at a higher levels of the application.