Beginnings

In which a brief overview of current SG software and roadmap is given. This week’s adventures: Dart, Polymer, and Hugo.

Hello again. This week our attention has been focused on creating a small browser client for the prototype Mindfork backend we have running here:

Polymer-Dart: does not play well with others.

The SynapseGarden Weblog is a Hugo blog hosted on Github Pages. Embedded scripts must therefore require minimal modification to HTML content, since it is generated from Markdown.

This sets the expectations well for our web client. Right now we’re working out the details of our client architecture, but there are some basic requirements out the gate:

• Must provide easily distributed reusable standalone components.
• These components must be usable together in a greater app context.
• These components must offer backend connectors for Mindfork.

We therefore kept these elements at the forefront during the week’s work with Polymer-Dart. Alas, it is far from a match made in heaven. While Polymer-Dart seems to meet our needs nicely, the reality is that it has strong expectations about the structure and content of the entire site it works within, to the extent that it generates the HTML index which it expects to work with, with significant mangling.

It’s possible this could be picked apart and found to be workable, and we’d love for it to be. However, it doesn’t look like this is the framework we need for Dash.

This week

The next section is a brief overview of our week exploring Polymer-Dart for our Dash frontend. In this section, we’ll outline what we’re working on this week.

Right now, we have a simple prototype Mindfork service running at https://mfp.synapsegarden.net:25000. The source is linked above; we encourage you to review the API and open a pull request if you see anything you’d like to add.

In the meantime, we’re pushing forward on offering an embedded web login panel and a few other features (e.g. password reset) so that logins can be handed out and automated collaboration begin in earnest.

Dash you say?

Dash is a concept we’ve been hammering out for some time, for a very atteries-included framework for building apps which make use of Mindfork backends. Since SynapseGarden’s community and development will be driven by the Mindfork backend, Dash will be used extensively in our web UI.

If our goal was to build our own webapp and backend, the obvious choice would be to use an existing set of tools; Ember, Angular, React, and many others offer excellent options for anyone who wants to build a particular frontend.

However, what we’re really looking to do is to provide tools for people to build with minimal effort web applications that make use of community-driven data on the Mindfork model. That means collaboration, human networking, and behavioral optimization.

While all of the aforementioned options may prove to be useful to this end, what we will distribute to developers who wish to use Mindfork will not look like a Javascript framework. It may be a library, similar to d3js, which intelligent data-driven elements can be used from in simple (or complex) Javascript. It may be a set of Web Components. Our options are still open; however, we recently made the tough decision to abandon our Clojurescript frontend.

Dart you say?

We believe Dart offers a highly-structured and easily-tested systematic approach to web application development. While we want to offer an easy and usable API to people who want to use Dash, we don’t particularly care that it’s easy to open the hood and muck about with. Most users should not have to do that; those who do are intelligent enough to learn Dart, which is a very easy and usable language from what little we’ve experienced. Like Go, it offers quite excellent tooling out of the box, and does not require any third-party software besides the Dart SDK. There’s an excellent plugin for Intellij IDEA, if that’s your style; otherwise, everything in the Dart SDK is comfortable to use from the command line.

Ultimately, the needs of our community come first and foremost; we are also considering ES6, and X-Tag Web Components.

See you next week!