datasette.io VS Sapper

Opened an issue exploring alternatives here: https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io/issues/109

I decided to just drop "any size" but keep "any shape".

Here's an example from one of my projects: https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io/blob/main/.github/workflows/deploy.yml

I've come around to almost the opposite approach.

I pull all of the data I can get my hands on (from Twitter, GitHub, Swarm, Apple Health, Pocket, Apple Photos and more) into SQLite database tables that match the schema of the system that they are imported from.

For my own personal Dogsheep (https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/14/personal-data-warehous...) that's 119 tables right now.

Then I use SQL queries against those tables to extract and combine data in ways that are useful to me.

If the schema of the systems I am importing from changes, I can update my queries to compensate for the change.

This protects me from having to solve for a standard schema up front - I take whatever those systems give me. But it lets me combine and search across all of the data from disparate systems essentially at runtime.

I even have a search engine for this, which is populated by SQL queries against the different source tables. You can see an example of how that works at https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io/blob/main/templates/d... - which powers the search interface at https://datasette.io/-/beta

I've been exploring this technique more over the past year and I really like it - https://datasette.io (code at https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io ) is a more recent and much more complicated example.

Extracting links from markdown and using them to populate some additional columns or tables at build time would be pretty straight forward.

I run SQLite in serverless environments (Cloud Run, Vercel, Heroku) for dozens of projects... but the trick is that they all treat the database as a read-only asset.

If I want to deploy updated data, I build a brand new image and deploy the application bundled with the data. I tend to run the deploys for these (including the database build) in GitHub Actions workflows.

This works really well, but only for applications that don't need to apply constant updates more than a few times an hour! If you have a constant stream of updates I still think you're better off using a hosted database like Heroku PostgreSQL or Google Cloud SQL.

One example of a site I deploy like that is https://datasette.io/ - it's built and deployed by this GitHub Actions workflow here: https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io/blob/main/.github/wor...

I built my first simple blog site in 2020 using Svelte and Sapper. The blog posts were powered by markdown files stored in the repository, and it was a great starting point.

Sapper

pancake which has very scarce documentation and is in thorough experimentation(at the time of writing). Since it has been created by Rich Harris, you can rest assured that it might probably never get documentation or a stable release just like our fallen soldier sapper (a moment of silence in remembrance)

You might also want to check out Sapper, a framework built on Svelte that allows you to develop more advanced features like server-side rendering, offline support, and file-based routing.

Does this help https://github.com/sveltejs/sapper/issues/343

SvelteKit can be considered the successor to Sapper or NextJS for Svelte. It is packed with tons of cool features, like server side rendering, routing, and code splitting.

So after using Sapper for some time, I decided to move my website to SvelteKit. I remember saying that I would not move to SvelteKit till they hit version 1 but the framework looks too promising. It had features which I needed and those features weren't in Sapper.

By that time, we had some troubles with virtual dom itself in our custom rich text editor that we based on slate - it was getting a bit laggy when creating huge financial documents (they usually have enormous tables and a lot of infographics) -so we were already thinking about other options and that’s where svelte comes into the light - especially sapper which was de facto default framework to be used with svelte at that time (SvelteKit wasn’t even announced).

Sapper is a framework for building web applications of all sizes, with a beautiful development experience and flexible filesystem-based routing. It is the predecessor of Sveltekit.