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Personally I believe strongly in thick clients but this is a pretty neat demo anyways. I see a lot of resemblance to http://catalyst.rocks http://catalyst.rock

Personally I believe strongly in thick clients but this is a pretty neat demo anyways. I see a lot of resemblance to http://catalyst.rocks http://catalyst.rocks with WebComponents that target other components. I think there's something unspoken here that's really powerful & interesting, which is the declarativization of the UI. We have stuff on the page, but making the actions & linkages of what does what to what has so far been trapped in code-land, away from the DOM. The exciting possibility is that we can nicely encode more of the behavior into the DOM, which creates a consistent learnable/visible/malleable pattern for wiring (and rewiring) stuff up. It pushes what hypermedia can capture into a much deeper zone of behaviors than just anchor-tag links (and listeners, which are jump points away from the medium into codespace).

CRConrad 3y ago
> ...declarativization of the UI. We have stuff on the page, but making the actions & linkages of what does what to what has so far been trapped in code-land, away from the DOM. The exciting possibility is that we can nicely encode more of the behavior into the DOM, which creates a consistent learnable/visible/malleable pattern for wiring (and rewiring) stuff up. Web “app” development finally catching up to where Visual Basic and Delphi were ~30 years ago, hurrah!
haolez 3y ago
Catalyst looks nice! What's the downside? Is it dead?
- rektide 3y ago
  Catalyst is great. Definitely active, actively used, last updates in main were late February. They have a big 2.0 branch that has a ton of internal changes. TypeScript 5.0 finally updated to support modern @decorator syntax & they're rewriting a bunch to support that, which is excellent.
wwweston 3y ago
> the declarativization of the UI Yes! There's always going to be some range of client behavior that's difficult to reduce to declarations, but so much of what we do is common that if it isn't declarative we're repeating a lot of effort. And in general I think you're describing a big part of what made the web successful in the first place; the UI-as-document paradigm was declarative, accessible, readable, repeatable.
- rektide 3y ago
  Thank you! Yes and!: > but so much of what we do is common that if it isn't declarative we're repeating a lot of effort. We're not only repeating effort, we're also using artisinal approaches to wiring things up. Hand writing handlers is repeated work with low repeatability; there'll be a variety of forms & ways & places people end up writing similar-ish handlers, & creating the data model to pass all the references/targets around. Being more declarative is not only less work, it also ought be much higher quality, more predictable, to have a lot less vagueries of implementation. It'll make it much easier to comprehend & maintain. Less work, for more repeatable/consistent outcomes.
Alifatisk 3y ago
That looks alot like Stimulus!
- rektide 3y ago
  Yeah it is! I meant to cite that too. It's mentioned by Catalyst as inspiration, somewhere.

CRConrad 3y ago

> ...declarativization of the UI. We have stuff on the page, but making the actions & linkages of what does what to what has so far been trapped in code-land, away from the DOM. The exciting possibility is that we can nicely encode more of the behavior into the DOM, which creates a consistent learnable/visible/malleable pattern for wiring (and rewiring) stuff up. Web “app” development finally catching up to where Visual Basic and Delphi were ~30 years ago, hurrah!

haolez 3y ago

Catalyst looks nice! What's the downside? Is it dead?

rektide 3y ago
Catalyst is great. Definitely active, actively used, last updates in main were late February. They have a big 2.0 branch that has a ton of internal changes. TypeScript 5.0 finally updated to support modern @decorator syntax & they're rewriting a bunch to support that, which is excellent.

wwweston 3y ago

> the declarativization of the UI Yes! There's always going to be some range of client behavior that's difficult to reduce to declarations, but so much of what we do is common that if it isn't declarative we're repeating a lot of effort. And in general I think you're describing a big part of what made the web successful in the first place; the UI-as-document paradigm was declarative, accessible, readable, repeatable.

rektide 3y ago
Thank you! Yes and!: > but so much of what we do is common that if it isn't declarative we're repeating a lot of effort. We're not only repeating effort, we're also using artisinal approaches to wiring things up. Hand writing handlers is repeated work with low repeatability; there'll be a variety of forms & ways & places people end up writing similar-ish handlers, & creating the data model to pass all the references/targets around. Being more declarative is not only less work, it also ought be much higher quality, more predictable, to have a lot less vagueries of implementation. It'll make it much easier to comprehend & maintain. Less work, for more repeatable/consistent outcomes.

Alifatisk 3y ago

That looks alot like Stimulus!

rektide 3y ago
Yeah it is! I meant to cite that too. It's mentioned by Catalyst as inspiration, somewhere.