depsdev VS exhibitor

Open Source Insights by Google for the dependency graph

Something I've recently worked on is building an SQLite database of all the dependencies my organisation uses, which makes it possible to write our own queries and reports. The tool is all Open Source (https://dmd.tanna.dev) and has a CLI as well as the SQLite data.

Ive used it to look for software that's out of date (via https://endoflife.date), to find vulnerablilities (via https://osv.dev) and get license information (via https://deps.dev)

It's been hugely useful for us understanding use of internal and external dependencies, and I wish I'd built it earlier in my career so I could've had it for other companies I've worked at!

https://deps.dev/ (a Google project) repeatedly examines sites such as github.com, npmjs.com, and pkg.go.dev to find up-to-date information about open source software packages. Using that information it builds for each package the full dependency graph from scratch—not just from package lock files—connecting it to the packages it depends on and to those that depend on it. And then does it all again to keep the information fresh. This transitive dependency graph allows problems in any package to be made visible to the owners and users of any software they affect.

TL;DR: A React front-end component workshop, a simple version of Storybook.

So around 5 months ago, I needed a tool to preview front-end (React) components whilst I create them for a personal project of mine. There were two options: Storybook or Ladle.

Storybook is the tool everybody knows. I've used it before quite a lot. It's very big, full-fat, supports loads of use-cases, etc.

Ladle comes out of Uber. It's very small, lean, and doesn't support that much. After trying it out for a while, it just gives me a feeling like it's a 20% project to learn some new tech.

So I realised that I wanted something kind of in the middle. Something that's a bit more customizable than Ladle, but something much simpler and less intrusive than Storybook.

This led me to create Exhibitor (https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor) (https://demo.exhibitor.dev).

I worked on it on-and-off for a couple months, and it ended up being something that I'm quite proud of. It's not perfect, and supports only a fraction of what Storybook does, however for a tool made by 1 engineer vs the 20+ for Storybook, I'm quite happy about it!

Exhibitor, a snappy & delightful React component workshop, is GA. My aim is for Exhibitor to be an extremely fast, easy to use, and delightful tool for creating front-end component libraries.

It's been around 2 months since my last mention and quite a tonne has changed.

Wiki: https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor/wiki

Looks interesting. Coincidentally, I've just completed the bulk of work on a distributed Websocket network system to synchronize certain bits of state between multiple clients for my own kind of Storybook tool [0]. How interesting!

This kind of tool is exactly what I would have needed, instead of the approach I've taken which is a bit kludgy, grass-roots, novice-like, etc.

Good work :)

[0] https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor/pull/22

I was a bit deflated when my submission about https://github.com/samhuk/exhibitor fell through the HN floor-boards.

Think Storybook but simpler, faster, better Typescript support, and uses esbuild by default.

...Is the aim. I'm the sole lead dev working on it at the moment up against the ~10-20 strong team who built most of Storybook, so it's a long road ahead, but it's growing into something I'm quite proud of and happy about.