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Hello everyone - David (creator of XState) from Stately here! Excited (also anxious) to see this on Hacker News. Please keep in mind that it is a public beta:

Hello everyone - David (creator of XState) from Stately here! Excited (also anxious) to see this on Hacker News. Please keep in mind that it is a public beta: we have many features and improvements planned. If you have any suggestions, comments, or bug reports, please post them here: https://github.com/statelyai/editor-feedback/issues https://github.com/statelyai/editor-feedback/issues EDIT: Also, we host office hours every Friday, where we answer community questions https://www.youtube.com/statelyai https://www.youtube.com/statelyai Thanks, and happy diagramming!

zellyn 5y ago
A couple of questions: 1. Which parts are open source? Will it require a commercial license? 2. I once worked on an already-existing credit card chargebacks system that was horrifically complex, with all kinds of variations and rules and states that play out over weeks or even months. The logic was scattered all around a Rails app, sometimes in clear chunks of business logic, but sometimes something like an `expired?` accessor on a chargeback variant would know the expiry period for that type of chargeback, etc. I toyed with the idea of trying to pull all the logic out into some kind of non-code representation. Possibly a state machine diagram, possibly a giant spreadsheet (because with real-world payment processing, you can get just about any response when you're in any state, whether it seems valid or not, and you have to choose to do _something_!). Possibly a state machine diagram for the normal path but with a spreadsheet representation for the full cross-product of weird state transitions. Alas (or thankfully), I moved to a different project before I could undertake anything ambitious. Would Stately let me do that? Move the knowledge of a hideously complex real-world, extended process that had been painstakingly gathered for years and encoded in logic scattered around an application, and let non-programmer, business-level people use that representation to understand and even tweak parameters of the process?
- davidkpiano 5y ago
  1. XState is open-source and MIT-licensed: https://github.com/statelyai/xstate https://github.com/statelyai/xstate, as well as the extension https://github.com/statelyai/xstate-vscode https://github.com/statelyai/xstate-vscode and various other tooling. The editor is closed-source. 2. Really good example – yes, the Stately editor is intended to be the tool for that! Whether it's just diagramming, in the same way you would use any other diagramming tool, to going even further and simulating those diagrams or even using them directly in your code, the editor is meant to be a tool for making executable diagrams where you can also document and share complex logic.
pbowyer 5y ago
Nice work! Anything that helps visualise state I'm happy to see. Reading the linked article I'm unclear: does Stately generate output that we run with XState? Or is it a SaaS where we design and run the state machine (a bit like Camunda provides for running BPMN diagrams)? If not already present, a visual runner would be awesome - like https://github.com/bpmn-io/bpmn-js-token-simulation https://github.com/bpmn-io/bpmn-js-token-simulation allows, to explore the state. Edit: looking at the Visualizer I think you've already got a visual runner - I click my way through and see/choose the options at each stage. Cool!

zellyn 5y ago

A couple of questions: 1. Which parts are open source? Will it require a commercial license? 2. I once worked on an already-existing credit card chargebacks system that was horrifically complex, with all kinds of variations and rules and states that play out over weeks or even months. The logic was scattered all around a Rails app, sometimes in clear chunks of business logic, but sometimes something like an `expired?` accessor on a chargeback variant would know the expiry period for that type of chargeback, etc. I toyed with the idea of trying to pull all the logic out into some kind of non-code representation. Possibly a state machine diagram, possibly a giant spreadsheet (because with real-world payment processing, you can get just about any response when you're in any state, whether it seems valid or not, and you have to choose to do _something_!). Possibly a state machine diagram for the normal path but with a spreadsheet representation for the full cross-product of weird state transitions. Alas (or thankfully), I moved to a different project before I could undertake anything ambitious. Would Stately let me do that? Move the knowledge of a hideously complex real-world, extended process that had been painstakingly gathered for years and encoded in logic scattered around an application, and let non-programmer, business-level people use that representation to understand and even tweak parameters of the process?

davidkpiano 5y ago
1. XState is open-source and MIT-licensed: https://github.com/statelyai/xstate https://github.com/statelyai/xstate, as well as the extension https://github.com/statelyai/xstate-vscode https://github.com/statelyai/xstate-vscode and various other tooling. The editor is closed-source. 2. Really good example – yes, the Stately editor is intended to be the tool for that! Whether it's just diagramming, in the same way you would use any other diagramming tool, to going even further and simulating those diagrams or even using them directly in your code, the editor is meant to be a tool for making executable diagrams where you can also document and share complex logic.

pbowyer 5y ago

Nice work! Anything that helps visualise state I'm happy to see. Reading the linked article I'm unclear: does Stately generate output that we run with XState? Or is it a SaaS where we design and run the state machine (a bit like Camunda provides for running BPMN diagrams)? If not already present, a visual runner would be awesome - like https://github.com/bpmn-io/bpmn-js-token-simulation https://github.com/bpmn-io/bpmn-js-token-simulation allows, to explore the state. Edit: looking at the Visualizer I think you've already got a visual runner - I click my way through and see/choose the options at each stage. Cool!