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Got sidetracked reading through the Overture.js documentation and source, which I hadn't seen before. It seems like a really impressive Javascript framework. Li

Got sidetracked reading through the Overture.js documentation and source, which I hadn't seen before. It seems like a really impressive Javascript framework. Live queries ie. data views, lots of great animation support, nice set of stock components... It's a real shame they put all this work into a monolithic framework rather than contributing packages / ideas / insight to something like React or the broader ecosystem. I feel like these kitchen-sink frameworks are more or less on the way out -- this is probably a fantastic body of work that few people (myself included!) will learn well enough to appreciate.

nmjenkins 11y ago
Well, Overture was created several years before React came along (it actually predates Angular and Ember as well), so it would have been hard to make it as plugins to this! It's not actually as monolithic as it first appears: a small change to the build tool could easily let you just build the parts you want (e.g. just the view system, or just the datastore). Each folder inside the source/Overture/ directory is really a separate module. The dependency information between the modules is already in the files so that the build tool orders them correctly, so it would be a small extension to make it only include the modules you want + dependencies. Basically, the library is perfect for us (and we think it's pretty neat; our web app is one of the largest, most complex and fastest out there, and the codebase is very clean). But we totally understand that the lack of more documentation, examples (or even books, tutorials and seminars!) compared to the popular libraries makes it harder for people to get into. We still wanted to put the code out there in case someone found it useful, even if only as inspiration rather than using it directly. If you want to see an example of idiomatic Overture usage, take a look at the source of the JMAP demo webmail. It's fewer than 2000 lines of non-library code, and yet packs a lot in!

nmjenkins 11y ago

Well, Overture was created several years before React came along (it actually predates Angular and Ember as well), so it would have been hard to make it as plugins to this! It's not actually as monolithic as it first appears: a small change to the build tool could easily let you just build the parts you want (e.g. just the view system, or just the datastore). Each folder inside the source/Overture/ directory is really a separate module. The dependency information between the modules is already in the files so that the build tool orders them correctly, so it would be a small extension to make it only include the modules you want + dependencies. Basically, the library is perfect for us (and we think it's pretty neat; our web app is one of the largest, most complex and fastest out there, and the codebase is very clean). But we totally understand that the lack of more documentation, examples (or even books, tutorials and seminars!) compared to the popular libraries makes it harder for people to get into. We still wanted to put the code out there in case someone found it useful, even if only as inspiration rather than using it directly. If you want to see an example of idiomatic Overture usage, take a look at the source of the JMAP demo webmail. It's fewer than 2000 lines of non-library code, and yet packs a lot in!