Does Compose for Web have an interoperability story that's as compelling as Compose for Android i.e ...

# compose-web

[Vinay Gaba]

Does Compose for Web have an interoperability story that's as compelling as Compose for Android i.e can I leverage Compose for Web in an existing React website? If yes, any examples I can check? I think incremental adoption would be super powerful and I have a feeling that its most likely supported or at least on the roadmap?

[Vinay Gaba]

cc @louiscad who just asked me a related question that got me thinking about this 😄

[shikasd]

I think JB provided some examples with React interop here: https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-jb/tree/master/examples/web-with-react, not sure if you are looking for something more involved or not :)

[jim]

Also, Compose for Web will just compose into a DOM node, so you can take pretty much any DOM node and render your Compose tree inside it.

[Vinay Gaba]

that's fantastic! As a follow up, does this require me to leverage kotlinx.html first? Can I use my pure vanilla React app and still use Compose for building some of the components (if I wanted to)

[shikasd]

Kotlinx.html is completely unrelated here, I think, it is just a dsl for building html :)
Compose allows to render Composables into any dom node, so you can just grab a ref from React component, and use it as a root for Compose.

[Vinay Gaba]

Interesting! Thinking about how I can introduce it in a React codebase. Like how do I include it within a project that uses npm for dependency management.

[louiscad]

Maybe you can try creating a Kotlin/JS project, and include your existing React code into it instead?

[shikasd]

I think it would require some clever interfacing to expose proper methods to JS + somehow merge webpack/(name your bundler) configuration to build and include Kotlin/JS bundle

[louiscad]

@Sebastian Aigner If you're looking at helping folks doing Kotlin for the browser, I think that for a starter, an example of adding Kotlin/JS to an existing React project would be very helpful.

[hfhbd]

What do you miss when using this sample?
https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-jb/tree/master/examples/web-with-react

[louiscad]

Integrating with a non Kotlin project, with no plans to rewrite the React code to Kotlin.

[hfhbd]

Ahh, okay.

[Akif Abasov [JB]]

@louiscad, you don’t need to rewrite it in Kotlin, you just need to write some external declarations to make it possible to call js react components from Kotlin.
https://kotlinlang.org/docs/js-interop.html#external-modifier
And looks like it is used in example above:
https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-jb/blob/master/examples/web-with-react/src/jsMain/kotlin/ReactYoutubePlayer.kt