Is Elm for us? Non-developers building small applets

[Salomon Turgman Cohen]

Dear Elm community,
I am interested in building little educational demos like those shown in this website http://www.learncheme.com/simulations The ones in that website require player software that is almost 800 MB,and I feel we can do better. It seems like Elm is a good tool to approach this, but I'm wondering if it is overkill. Maybe there is a simpler approach I can follow? What are the advantages of using Elm for something small like this over the alternative (a combo of JS Libraries)?

Thanks for your advice.

-s-

[John Mayer]

Yes! It's probably a sweet spot for Elm-the-language. Taking a peek at learncheme, you may need to spend some of your total effort on building new or improving existing graphing/charting features; though that's a great opportunity to contribute back.

-s-

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[Erkal Selman]

Elm is great for those kind of things.

I also think that elm provides the simplest approach, though you can give http://aprt.us/ a shot.

[Joshua Mendoza]

Since the Elm architecture needs to have a consistent model all the time you can think of the variables and preconditions of an experiment as part of that model and everything you need to do is to provide a view (HTML code) that reflects this state (I was looking at your Compressed Gas Spray example, all buttons and controls can be modeled that way very well). Consequently, every control change needs to be reflected in an update function that changes one piece of this model (variables a preconditions corpus) and the wiring (commanding actions, effects, consequences that change the model) needs to be done with these concepts: 

http://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/user_input/forms.html

http://guide.elm-lang.org/architecture/effects/time.html

My personal recommendation if you're to follow the Elm path, is to wait a little bit since there has been an important upgrade in the core Language and many of us are struggling to keep up with the changes (I mean, everything got easier but previous work and libraries have been rendered useless because of API changes).

[Salomon Turgman Cohen]

Thank you all for the comments.

John,

Can you point out what are the currently existing charting/graphing features in elm? I am going to implement a simple simulation without any graphics (just displaying numbers and controls perhaps) first. It seems that when I need to start with graphics elm/svg should be enough?

Erkal,

That looks great! I will try it out as well.

Joshua,

I learned about the update the hard way, I was reading 0.16 docs when the update happened and everything changed. It was quite shocking (my first experience with a young and developing language). But I think I know what to expect and the downside of adopting something still in development.

-s-

Salomon Turgman Cohen
Assistant Professor
Chemical Engineering
Kettering University
(810)249-4045

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