SB: What I'll be studying

[Edward K. Ream]

It's becoming clearer what I'll be studying and exploring during the sabbatical.

For the last 25+ years I've pretty much ignored web development. That surely was a mistake. There is a ton of interesting technology out there.

My initial focus will be on node.js packages, and the frameworks and technologies connect to them. I first went down this rabbit hole by looking at the yarn.lock file for the jupyterlab project. This file contains all the node.js package dependencies. I then googled some dependencies and took a look at the packages.

The package-lock.json file shows package dependencies for the leovue and leointeg projects.

I then thought to google something like "most popular node.js packages", which unlocked 25+ years of programming effort. "Attached" to popular node.js packages are major projects/frameworks such as jupyterlab, react, angular, ruby on rails, vue.js, etc. etc.

Many of these technologies can be used to build web sites. I'll build a vanilla site for Rebecca using WordPress and woocommerce. Ditto for my son James. After that, I may play around with various frameworks and website builders.

My plan will be to get an overview of the web world first, and then see where this overview takes me.

All comments and suggestions welcome.

Edward

[Arjan]

I'd like to suggest looking into Svelte, a modern JavaScript framework that's compiled at build time, so it has great performance.

I enjoyed this presentation: Rich Harris - Rethinking reactivity (Youtube)

And the learning materials and REPL on https://svelte.dev/ are excellent.

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

Hi,

Adding to the Arjan's excellent suggestion, I would recommend:

• Computer, Build me an app: https://youtu.be/qqt6YxAZoOc
• The Return of 'Write Less, Do More' by Rich Harris  | JSCAMP 2019: https://youtu.be/BzX4aTRPzno

For getting the overview you talk about, I would reemphasize the review of the Jamstack[1] and see and share (maybe with yourself using Telegram or some instant messaging app) several introductory videos related with Jamstack, as is my most effective way to train the YouTube algorithm to recommend me more stuff about that (I usually choose long talks about the subject I'm interested before going bed, so the algorithm refines its model to recommend me more long form content about it when I wake up next morning).

[1] https://jamstack.org/

I have been a "coding researcher"  since 2014 when I rediscovered Pharo and used it for my PhD, but I have also gladly ignored the web development since mid 90's, focusing my code/tech concerns elsewhere and I'm happy about that as it allow me to keep an eye on the web as a tech user, without paying its technical debt of gratuitous over complication. For me the web is more an "exportation format", so I write in agile languages/environments like Pandoc's Markdown, or Pharo and export for the web (or for printing). I write something like [2] and get something like [3] and now that the Jamstack is here, I see some alignment between what we are doing at the local community[4] and a more global movement, avoiding mid 90's monoliths like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and having a more decoupled and personalized approach to web presence. Stuff like TinaCMS[5] (despite of being for React based CMS)  are showing that non-technical users can also enjoy the benefits of decoupled CMS that developers are advocating for.

[2] https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/indieweb/file?name=docs/es/que-por-que.md&txt=1
[3] https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/indieweb/doc/trunk/docs/es/que-por-que.html
[4] https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/indieweb/
[5] https://tinacms.org/

Also the approach of languages like ClojureScript and Elm to writing for the web without writing JavaScript but having the possibility to talk with its wider ecosystem have been refreshing, instead of the web as a monolingual culture (well trilingual: JS, HTML, CSS) of bureaucratic slow evolving standards that has been for nearly 20 years (I don't mind that much on content/HTML or presentation/CSS languages but is really painful in the programming/JS one).

So I would say that this is a good time for someone who have avoided the web development to jump on it from a more diverse, decoupled, simplified multilingual approach, now that web is maturing and catching with features some of us thought it should have since its beginnings. The key would be to have such broad panoramic view of what is possible to avoid "upgrading to the 90's", as I have seen many local government institutions do when they start to teach web development and infrastructure.

Cheers,

Offray

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[rengel]

JavaScript might be commonplace, but the exciting action is in functional solutions:

i.e. Elixir (https://elixir-lang.org/) and Phoenix (https://phoenixframework.org/).

Why? Because JavaScript does not teach new ways of thinking.

Yes, I know, this is very opinionated...

Reinhard

[rengel]

For an example of a Phonix web application see for instance https://phoenixframework.org/blog/build-a-real-time-twitter-clone-in-15-minutes-with-live-view-and-phoenix-1-5 directly from the horse`s mouth.

Reinhard

(PS: Sorry, couldn't edit my previous post, and don't know why.)

[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

Hi,

In a world where JavaScript is a commonplace, disliking it becomes automatically opinionated :-).

I put sparkles of JS here and there for my web sites, but I don't plan to make it my main programming language and now that JS transpilers are becoming a more common place I plan to keep using Pharo as much as possible, as for now, nothing beats its live coding experience and programming environment. So I would say the "J" of Jamstack is more about "JavaScript as a bridge" that as the primary language, as the "P" in LAMP Stack meant PHP, but in some context became Python or Perl or even non P named languages and the "M" was not about "MySQL always".

I also like Elixir and I think that the BEAM is a pretty awesome technology for parallelism, as it is shown in this excellent talk[1]. It is not the place where I'm focused as I'm more interested in live coding and moldable tools[2a] and for that Pharo[2] is a pretty powerful tool that change the way you think about/with software.

[1] GOTO 2019 • The Soul of Erlang and Elixir • Saša Jurić https://youtu.be/JvBT4XBdoUE
[2] https://pharo.org/
[2a] Tudor Gîrba - Moldable development https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pot9GnHFOVU

So, going back to the exploration of web technologies, my approach has been to leverage the knowledge and aesthetics I already have to find a static site generator[3] (for example a Python based one) and to create a site on it (preferably using some pre-existing template with a good design) and also to see the infrastructure from the point of view of an "end user" or a community that is going to add content to such site. That is how I went from web2py[3a] to Grav[3b] to Brea[3c], my own Pharo based CMS (as Pharo was the language I was using to customize Grav's markdown and YAML source files anyway). This is a story of progressive decoupling: as the excellent and integrated web2py became kind of over complex for the stuff we were doing/needing, Grav allow an editing experience I thought could be friendly while we enjoyed flat file storage, which enabled redundant storage and editing via Fossil (but it could be Git). And because we where working with plain files, their processing could be done in several languages (I chose Pharo). Once Grav customization became also over complex and after seeing that nobody was using Grav's web ui the next step was to build an even simpler solution combining Pharo, Pandoc and Fossil which resonated strongly with the explorations of the Jamstack and the IndieWeb[4][4a] about building your own tools and web presence.

[3] https://jamstack.org/generators/
[3a] http://web2py.com/
[3b] https://getgrav.org/
[3c] https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/brea/
[4] https://indieweb.org/
[4a] https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/indieweb/

Fiuuuhhh, Edward's sabbatical makes me talk even more that on-topic conversations... ;-P ... Maybe I should write a blog post instead and invite you to my IndieWeb place to keep the conversation.

Cheers,

Offray

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[Kent Tenney]

Another interesting project is Brython, Python in the browser

https://brython.info/

good documentation and demo

very heavy development, easy to install and run locally

- git clone https://github.com/brython-dev/brython.git

- cd brython/www

- python3 -m http.server

- browse to localhost:8000

(current trunk returns 404 for 'Tutorial' )

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[Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas]

Thanks Kent,

With that my Python path to Jamstack/IndieWeb would be some Python based static site generator and brython to add interactive JavaScript powered features here and there. Now I've started exploring form creators to enable non-tech users to add content to the site.

Cheers,

Offray

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