A virtual DOM is a lightweight

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...

representation of the Document Object Model (DOM) used in declarative web frameworks such as React, Vue.js, and Elm. Updating the virtual DOM is comparatively faster than updating the actual DOM (via JavaScript). Thus, the framework is free to make unnecessary changes to the virtual DOM relatively cheaply. The framework then finds the differences between the previous virtual DOM and the current one, and only makes the necessary changes to the actual DOM. Svelte does not have a virtual DOM, and its creator Rich Harris calls the virtual DOM "pure overhead". Related techniques include

Ember.js Ember.js is an open-source JavaScript web framework that utilizes a component-service pattern. It allows developers to create scalable single-page web applications by incorporating common idioms, best practices, and patterns from other single-pa ...

' Glimmer and Angular's incremental DOM.

References

{{Compu-stub Web development Object models