Introducing Kaioken

Yet another framework enters the scene. Why?

Obsessing over web application composition is one of the greatest time sinks of the 21st century. I myself have been a victim of this and over the years built many-a-thing aimed at taking care of my frontend woes.

Most approaches in the year 2024 have us managing many interrelated (but very separate) dependencies, cobbling together our choices of tooling and libraries and hoping that it all just works™.

When things don't work, we spend time searching through articles for solutions that may or may not apply to the versions of libraries we selected, often coming up empty handed. Having suffered this pain, we then either have to implement things ourselves or look at alternatives. Many would attest to defeats like this being the greatest pain of modern front-end web development.

Enter Kaioken - what's different?

Enough to make a difference, not enough to leave you bewildered. Kaioken makes use of familiar semantics and declarative APIs that will make developers feel at home.

Kaioken is intended to be a long-lived, lightweight, open-source front-end framework that encompasses many familiar solutions that you'd expect to come from extra dependencies when using something like React. Take for example Zustand - most React developers are familiar with it and will swear by it, and with good reason. Taking this as inspiration, Kaioken provides a similar Store API with fine-grained reactivity through the use of signals.

I plan for Kaioken to follow this pattern going forward, taking inspiration from all corners of web development and implementing concepts and tools that make it a more well-rounded solution than the major alternatives.

It will remain open source forever and I hope people who share my vision will join me on this journey to emancipation of our bonds to the dependency hell ecosystem.

Visit kaioken.dev to learn more!