The Odoo Web Library (OWL) is a small UI framework intended to be the basis for the Odoo Web Client, and hopefully many other Odoo related projects. OWL's main feature is a declarative component system, with QWeb as a template engine, asynchronous rendering, and an underlying virtual dom.

Try it online! An online playground is available at https://odoo.github.io/owl/playground to let you experiment with the OWL framework.

OWL's design principles

OWL is designed to be used in highly dynamic applications where changing requirements are common, code needs to be maintained by large teams.

XML based: templates are based on the XML format, which allows interesting applications. For example, they could be stored in a database and modified dynamically with xpaths.
templates compilation in the browser: this may not be a good fit for all applications, but if you need to generate dynamically user interfaces in the browser, this is very powerful. For example, a generic form view component could generate a specific form user interface for each various models, from a XML view.
no toolchain required: this is extremely useful for some applications, if, for various reasons (security/deployment/dynamic modules/specific assets tools), it is not ok to use standard web tools based on npm.

Owl is not designed to be fast or small (even though it is quite good on those two topics). If you are interested in a comparison with React or Vue, you will find some more information here.

Example

Here is a short example to illustrate interactive widgets:

class ClickCounter extends owl.Component {
  state = { value: 0 };

  increment() {
    this.state.value++;
  }
}

const TEMPLATES = `
    <button t-name="ClickCounter" t-on-click="increment">
        Click Me! [<t t-esc="state.value"/>]
    </button>`;

const qweb = new owl.QWeb(TEMPLATES);
const counter = new ClickCounter({ qweb });
counter.mount(document.body);

More interesting examples can be found on the playground application.

Installing/Building

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

Some npm scripts are available:

Command	Description
`npm install`	install every dependency required for this project
`npm run build`	build a bundle of owl in the /dist/ folder
`npm run minify`	minify the prebuilt owl.js file
`npm run test`	run all tests
`npm run test:watch`	run all tests, and keep a watcher
`npm run extras`	build extras applications, start a static server (see here)
`npm run extras:watch`	same as `extras`, but with a watcher to rebuild owl

Documentation

The complete documentation can be found here. The most important sections are:

License

OWL is GPL licensed.