ecars VS shelljs

For the eCars app that we’re building, the activity will be to write an APEX test class for the PdfCreateService that we used in the prior session to call a Heroku microservice for generating PDF documents. The eCars code can be found at the linked Github repo and I have also included a link to the specific PdfCreateService class. If you have not gone through the exercise of pulling the code into a Salesforce Developer org or a scratch org, you’ll want to review some of the previous articles to take that pre-requisite step or follow the instructions in the Github repo on how to clone and deploy the application.

The Javascript car configurator app we are going to test can be found on the eCars app Github repository. If you’ve been following along with this series, then you should have already done some previous setup work installing the repo in VS Code and deploying it to a Salesforce scratch org.

I'll share a step-by-step tutorial building the app, what I've learned, some of the highlights, and my take on some of the content. You can find all the code for the project here.

To start, let’s review the steps for Automated Deployment as also listed on the readme section in the Github repo. Julian has created a script (a Node.js program that will make this process easier) to get this up and running in the Salesforce and Heroku platforms. All of the installation pre-reqs, keys, and steps to configure your operating system before we move forward with deployment can be found here.

When I need shell-like utilities from my JS scripts I've previously used shelljs [0]. It's neat that Bun is adding more built-in utilities though.

[0] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs

Now we can open this new project and we're going to install one package, shelljs Shelljs is a great Command Line Utility for interacting with the command line in JavaScript.

Feels like this library is trying to solve a problem solved long ago by shelljs

The purpose of OP's project kind of reminded me of shell.js (shx) [1] which is a nodejs library that wraps all kinds of common UNIX commands to their own synchronously executed methods.

I guess that most shell projects start off as wanting to be a cross-platform solution to other operating systems, but somewhere in between either escalate to being their own programming language (like all the powershell revamps) or trying to reinvent the backwards-compatibility approach and/or POSIX standards (e.g. oil shell).

What I miss among all these new shell projects is a common standardization effort like sh/dash/bash/etc did back in the days. Without creating something like POSIX that also works on Windows and MacOS, all these shell efforts remain being only toy projects of developers without the possibility that they could actually replace the native shells of Linux distributions.

Most projects in the node.js area I've seen migrate their build scripts at some point to node.js, because maintaining packages and runtimes on Windows is a major shitshow. node.js has the benefit (compared to other environments) that it's a single .exe that you have to copy somewhere and then you're set to go.

When I compare that with python, for example, it is super hard to integrate. All the anaconda- or python-based bundles for ML engineers are pretty messed up environments on Windows; and nobody actually knows where their site-packages/libraries are really coming from and how to even update them correctly with upstream.

[1] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs

`` When I then run this file with./bin/nodefile`, it exits, but the working directory of the current shell context has not changed. I have also tried shelljs, but that does not work either.

Oh people have tried - here are a few https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10239235/are-there-any-l...

I vaguely remember quite liking bish when I saw it years ago https://github.com/tdenniston/bish but it looks like no commits in 6 years.

This shelljs thing looks more promising, but really tedious to use https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs - shell.rm('-rf', 'out/Release'); I'd rather suffer proper bash than have to do that sort of thing.

Nothing seems to have really caught on so far. Bash is easy to learn and hack on, and before you know it, that simple install.sh that started out moving a few files around is 5000 lines, unmaintainable, and critical to bootstrapping your software :)

I personally prefer shelljs for stuff like this. zx seems pretty high on the "insane syntactic sugar" train.

As we are creating starter files, let's use ShellJS to run commands like git clone, mkdir...

This talks a bunch about the "good run" of current scripting languages, including for example JavaScript.

But JavaScript, as an actual scripting language, has been pretty primitive but finally starting to become a real candidate for actual scripting. There's imo crufty not very great options like shelljs[1]. But adding a tagged-template string for system(), for calling things, and a little bit of standard library has made JS a much more interesting & competent scripting language. Those efforts are being done in ZX[2].

I like the idea of the topic, exploring it. But the author feels off in a number of places.

> What TypeScript showed is that you could join together the idea of a flexible lightweight (and optional!) type system onto an existing programming language, and do so successfully. . . .The question then is - what if you created a programming language from the start to have this kind of support?

Personally I just don't think languages matter very much. They're very similar, by & large. They have different tooling, packaging, somewhat different looks/feels for executing code, and their standard libraries are different. But TypeScript is popular & fast at least 90% because it is JS, because it works with JS things. Arguing that we should try to recreate TypeScript apart from JS sounds like a mind blowing waste of time. Also, Deno has good integrated TypeScript support.

On the topic of easy parallelism, JavaScript promises are imo quite easy to stitch together & use & quite available.

One of the main issues I see with easy-parallelism is that it's too easy: there's too many cases for uncontrolled parallelism. Throwing tarn.js or other worker-pools at problems seems all too common. But one is still left stitching together each pool/stage of work. I'd like to see SEDA[3] like architectures emerge, and perhaps get added to something like ZX standard library.

[1] https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs

[2] https://github.com/google/zx

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staged_event-driven_architectu...