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Pika – A JavaScript package registry for the modern web
- fenwick67 7y agoTotally off-topic but, is there a word for this style of marketing copy/design language with lots of deep blues, rounded edges, primary colors and geometric shapes? Atlassian and Digital ocean use something very similar.
- folkhack 7y agoFlat design I'd say is the closest, although there's a ton of ways you could describe this. I'd also describe it as minimalist + a strong focus on readable typography with space to "breathe". Other sites like Digital Ocean have a great focus on simple iconography that enhances their message. All-in-all I love that design trends have gone this direction as I think it's a friendlier and more efficient means to convey information =) Years ago skeuomorphism was a popular trend which is to try to make things 3D representing real-world objects (buttons, dials, etc). Although it's still highly prevalent in UI design, we've really backed off of the trend. A great example of this is early vs. current iOS. I mention this because there's a ton of great "skeuomorphism vs flat design" stuff out there discussing the ethos of sites like this.
- Thorentis 7y agoStripe uses something similar too. I'd say it's almost a "round" version of material design. It is present in the artwork too. Solid block colours and focus on geometric shapes. There are varients too (Facebook and Google do something similar, but their UX controls are sharper, but artwork similar design to this). I think it's just a current trend in the SaaS world. Search for "SaaS website templates" and you'll find most of them have this same style.
- chlorine64 7y agotoddler style http://jollo.org/LNT/public/nursery.html http://jollo.org/LNT/public/nursery.html
- burlesona 7y agoI don’t mean to be snarky, but when seeing “make our neat package registry easy to use we wrote our own custom IDE for you to develop in,” I can’t help but think this project has jumped the shark. Does Pika really expect devs to be so drawn to their package registry that they want to write in Pika Code instead of their existing editor of choice? Is publishing packages in JavaScript really that hard?
- reificator 7y agoIf there was an extension for VSCode, maybe I'll consider using it. But using your fork of it instead? Not a chance.
- ng12 7y agoI just don't understand dumping my entire development environment to solve one of the easier parts of package development.
- ratww 7y agoI think the whole point of Pika was to not require a complex local development environment for coding websites. Installing a bunch of stuff is probably the #1 or #2 main complaint about modern frontend and a huge roadblock for newbies. By using their CDN you can already make pages and apps with just a text editor, without node, npm, webpack, etc. I think it makes sense for them to try to improve the experience of package creation and publishing too.
- dgellow 7y agoWhy would those hypothetical newbies need to publish packages? That’s not something you should care about before quite some time when you’re learning a language. Or is the idea to have a registry full of tutorial packages?
- ratww 7y agoI never said that newbies would or should be publishing packages. Pika CDN and @pika/cli can potentially make newbies' lives easier, but it doesn't mean that every project under the Pika umbrella is aimed exclusively at newbies.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Nullabillity 7y agoFrom their about page... > Pika is building a world where third-party libraries can be loaded, cached, and shared across sites. Aren't most browsers disabling/about to disable cross-origin caching?
- jdnenej 7y agoIt was rarely useful anyway. I saw some stats showing even with jQuery it was extremely unlikely users already had a copy of the version of jQuery from the same CDN cached.
- t-writescode 7y agoWasn’t that the point of Google sharing a copy of jquery for everyone?
- ailideex 7y ago> Aren't most browsers disabling/about to disable cross-origin caching? Are they?
- Nullabillity 7y agoSorry, should have included a source link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21429621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21429621
- Etheryte 7y agoThere are many issues with the status quo of NPM, but I don't see this addressing any of the real issues. Code formatting is not a problem that a package registry should address; having a custom editor simply to use a registry is absurd. If those are the problems you wanted to address, you could've just written a plugin for a few common editors. The real issues that a package repository should address are security and verifiability. Is this package trustworthy? Is the latest minor version bump safe to use? What about dependencies deep down the tree? How to automatically detect when a package has been hijacked? How to handle benign package takeovers, e.g. package owner deciding to give ownership to maintainers. Etc etc.
- Hamuko 7y agoHow are you even going to force a single way of formatting when JS devs can't even agree on including/excluding semicolons?
- fiddlerwoaroof 7y agoTools like prettier have gone a long way to standardizing formatting in JS.
- firloop 7y agoTheir about page[0] is interesting. > "Pika is building a world where third-party libraries can be loaded, cached, and shared across sites" ... "With ESM and cross-origin caching, we can create a world where sites can share cached dependencies." This is an interesting angle on a package registry. The goal seems difficult to achieve as well since the common web cache as we know it is dying[1]. It seems like we'd need some sort of "dependency" support for web browsers if we'd ever want to achieve it. [0]: https://www.pika.dev/about https://www.pika.dev/about [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21429621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21429621
- flaque 7y agoIf this handled the "build & config" of publishing packages and made the whole process effectively 0-config, I could see myself using it. But there's a lot here that I don't want.
- bfred_it 7y agoWith GitHub templates and npm’s init/create packages you already have options without having to use an editor. Examples: npm init esm npm init react-app https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/init https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/init
- supercasio 7y agoI think the name is really bad in Brazilian Portuguese. Here "pika"* is a slang for dick. At the same time, it is still the sound Pikachu makes ("pika pika"). So maybe there is no problem. * I don't know about European Portuguese. The correct spelling for the slang would be "pica", but both have the same pronunciation.
- dagurp 7y agoIt means vagina in Icelandic
- supercasio 7y agoI don't know why but someone edited my comment. The original had 2 footnotes which were combined into one. Now it is ambiguous. Thank you for your disservice.
- jdminhbg 7y agoMost likely, you had a single line break between the two footnotes, but you need two to actually start a new paragraph. And if you started your second footnote with two asterisks, that gets read as an empty italicized string.
- ufo 7y agoProgrammers are always debugging their surroundings :)
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- p1necone 7y agoThe homepage looks like it's written for 5 year olds. 100pt font and piles of whitespace do not convey information effectively. Also the only thing I can see without scrolling down is a "give me your email" box. Not a good sign.
- unlinked_dll 7y ago>For this new ecosystem to work, we needed a consistent, universal dev experience for every package on the registry. That's the most absurd sentence thing I've seen in awhile, editing is orthogonal to package management. But others have that thread covered. This got my attention: > Pika publishes each package directly from source, so malicious or hacked authors can't skip code review or sneak malicious code unnoticed into the registry. I don't see how injecting yourself in the middle solves the problem, since exfiltrating data in the background from a downstream app is both necessary for some services and hard to identify as "bad". What I'd like to see in a registry is a registration fee per project (or pay per publish), non-anonymous registration (provide a government issued ID and mandatory 2FA), delayed deployment after publishing, and aggressive but open auditing. Plus org/user namespacing. Basically if you have an environment where a bad actor has to pay money, steal someone's identity, and takes awhile before they can even verify their attack has been successful - you'll cover a huge chunk of the attack surface area.
- ChristianBundy 7y ago> Basically if you have an environment where a bad actor has to pay money, steal someone's identity, and takes awhile before they can even verify their attack has been successful - you'll cover a huge chunk of the attack surface area. If you have an environment where a good actor has to pay money, provide their passport name with proof of identity, and has to put up with artificial deployment delays, I think you'll miss out on a huge chunk of good actors. I'm not convinced that it's possible to outsource your trust and audit decisions to some third-party system. We should be scaling at the speed of actual human trust, not giving up our privacy to companies or our security to randos.
- unlinked_dll 7y agoThere's plenty of places/ways to distribute software anonymously. And depending on software from an anonymous identity with no trust that the registry verified who they were or if subsequent publications came from the same entity is an attack vector. There is a time and place for anonymity, but I don't think a dependency registry is one of them (most of the time). And I think if you're going to make a new registry, such verification is a way to make yourself different.
- tannhaeuser 7y agoA custom JavasScript-DSL for this seems to conflict with established CommonJS conventions for browser-packages/assets distributed on npm (ie. to use "browser" instead or in addition to "main" entries in package.json), and also with ES6 modules ("esm").
- mc3 7y agoSeeing a new package manager makes me feel uneasy! Although NPM is not perfect, being able to NPM i all the things is nice, now that bower is defacto dead and you just use webpack instead. But if this takes off there will be choice again. Choice = JS fatigue!
- Aeolun 7y agoWhy not yarn? That’s been around a really long time to give you fatigue.
- pawelmurias 7y agoIt won't. It requires you to use a custom editor.
- manigandham 7y agoIt does not. The registry is completely separate from the code editor.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y agoThe problems Pika aims to solve don't sound like registry problems, and I think we could run into trouble as a consequence. For example, I've written code where I ES6 import an SVG file that, using webpack loaders, automatically becomes a React component. A tool like Pika isn't going to understand that without making broad assumptions of my project's structure. This is more than just, oh "Do I need ES Modules or Common JS?" or "That file needs to transpiled since it uses the spread operator, and I happen to be rendering on IE 11, which doesn't support that." In other words, I find this to be an interesting solution, but not something I'd feel comfortable with in enterprise-grade applications. Just learn how bundlers and transpilers work. It's going to be easier to do that, then understand why Pika won't do what you need it to, having to go through yet another layer of abstraction. I've been disappointed by tools in the past that try to abstract away the "difficult" parts of maintaining a webpack.config.js and babel.config.js file. I truly believe it is more beneficial for developers to learn these things, instead of trying to be ignorant of them and then fighting with a tool like Pika or a toolkit that doesn't meet your needs. Choose for yourself the better choice, and make your own toolkit: https://kentcdodds.com/blog/concerning-toolkits https://kentcdodds.com/blog/concerning-toolkits
- fiatjaf 7y agoHow can I use this? I see stuff like importing directly from a CDN? What does that mean? I could just call `import` in my source JavaScript without transpiling? I also see `npm install` stuff, so what's the difference? I'm interested in importing packages directly instead of transpiling stuff in some cases, but I don't see how would that work.
- fiatjaf 7y agoOk, got it: https://www.pika.dev/cdn https://www.pika.dev/cdn I'll start using this thing.
- navs 7y agoPika code has some nice features. I don't see myself switching away from PHPStorm/Visual Studio Code but the quick start feature seems like a great addition.
- manigandham 7y agoWhile using basic imports instead of a build step is nice, unfortunately most projects of any size or complexity end up requiring a build stage for components, css, static assets, optimization for the non-modern browsers and more. It seems like the niche served by a package manager/cdn that serves native ESM modules is rather small. The code editor seems unnecessary too, but it's built on VSCode so it can probably be repurposed into an extension easily. Better tools for publishing packages are needed though, and I like how it helps setup a modern environment for creating packages.
- thiht 7y agoI'm not really fond of the fact that the "About Us" page doesn't actually say anything about them. Who are you and why should I trust you?
- mst 7y agoSerious question: What does this provide that unpkg doesn't?
- z3t4 7y agoModules on the web will have a hard time due to: * Not good enough HTTP2 support in browsers. Browser will for example download pushed files twice, once when pushed, then again when imported, and not caching the pushed files. * Many developers prefer to brake their code up into small files, meaning there will be a lot of hops until the entire dependency tree has been resolved. * There is no standard for lazy loading, meaning the user need to download everything, even if only 5% is actually required. As much as a hate bundlers, and would like to see more code moduleability on the web, bundlers get the job done using code splitting, deduplication etc.
- disposedtrolley 7y agoWhile I don’t think I’ll be able to use Pika, it’s always good to see novel dev tools being released. I’m keen to see how Pika Code improves the end to end dev experience by presumably being tightly integrated with deployment. Remind me of Dark in a way.
- jeswin 7y agoIf I can give one advice to dev tool makers, it'll be this: Do not build an IDE. People are attached to IDEs like no other tool; they won't leave their customizations, key bindings, themes and switch to an unproven alternative. This isn't true all the time, but holds 99.9% of the time. Also, despite being fairly familiar with the JS ecosystem I am unable to make out what Pika does from the landing page. You probably need to do a better job of explaining the product.
- pgl 7y ago> I am unable to make out what Pika does from the landing page This seemed fairly succinct: > Pika is a new kind of package registry for the modern web Not sure what "Universal JavaScript" means though, and I don't understand why a registry would need an IDE.
- pjmlp 7y agoIf the programming language of the day doesn't come with IDE support, even if a clunky one, I won't bother much with it beyond a couple of weekends to try out what it brings new to world of programming.
- _pmf_ 7y agoSame. I'd love, for example, to try out Raku/Perl 6, but I'm no longer interested in fiddling with VSCode or Vim configurations for hours just to get a mediocre debugger running. (This is not a complaint, I definitely do not feel I deserve anything for free.)
- drej 7y agoFor those wondering what's wrong with npm, I can recommend this C J Silverio talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO8hZlgK5zc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MO8hZlgK5zc Sadly, as others have noted, this Pika thing does not quite address these issues.
- jug 7y agoThis looks like something designed to be paid when early access is over? I thought Visual Studio Code's extension API was so extensive by now that something like this could be delivered as an extension instead.
- k__ 7y agoWhile this seems to be an horrible attempt to replace NPM, how are the other attempts going?
- bobm_db 7y agoI'm going to go the other way on this. I like this idea, but I can see it's not for everyone. I like to do some Javascript coding with my son on his Chromebook, and having a development environment is a hard problem for us to solve for some reason. Having a webpage that just spins up VSCode and allows us to publish and test in a registry might be just what we need, no?
- _bxg1 7y agoThis website is incredibly confusing and hand-wavy, but from what I've read in the past about Pika, I believe (though I had trouble finding this clearly stated) its key feature is automatic conversion of third-party JavaScript modules to the ES6 (here referred to as ESM) module syntax. For those who aren't familiar, JavaScript has two distinct module syntaxes (and several variations on those). Nodejs brought its own when it came on the scene, and then later browsers standardized on a new one for the web. The two are incompatible in some pretty nasty ways (the former is a runtime function, the latter is fully static). So standard practice is to use a bundler like Webpack or Browserify to concatenate your code and all its dependencies into a single JS file (with modules being properly scoped, artificially, through functions scopes and other tricks) for use in web browsers. Basically, this allows browsers to avoid dealing with however all your modules may import each other; you can even mix both syntaxes in one project. The browser just sees one big file. The problem is, a) this makes it virtually impossible to use any dependencies from NPM on the front-end without a bundler, which means a minimum required amount of configuration and tooling, and b) you lose out on some potential caching benefits because files that may not change much can't be distinguished. So why doesn't everyone just use the new modules syntax so that code can be loaded in the browser, as separate modules, without bundling? Because if even a single one of your NPM dependencies is still in the other syntax, you're up a creek. It's like the IPv6 problem: until everyone has it, nobody does. So projects like (I think) Pika have cropped up to try and address this. If it really does auto-convert packages to the new modules syntax, that eliminates the biggest reason to use build tooling in a modern JS project. You could theoretically get away with having no build process at all.