evidence VS Docusaurus

We use echarts at https://evidence.dev and have been quite happy with it. We do a lot of embedded analytics and it's worked well for us.

It’s interesting to me how far you have pushed the SQL language in this framework, such that it truly is “SQL only”.

The challenge as I see it with enabling analysts to build websites is that you need to build abstractions to get from familiar (SQL, yaml) - the language of analytics, to new (HTML, CSS, JS) - the language of the web browser

As one of the maintainers of Evidence (https://evidence.dev), one of the things I’ve often considered is how accessible our syntax is to analysts. Our syntax combines SQL and Markdown, with MDX style components e.g.

The are inherently webdev-ey, and I do think they put off potential users.

On the flip-side, by adhering to web standards, you get extensibility out of the box, and working out what to do is just a Google search away.

Anyway, thanks for the thought provoking piece.

Dataclips was my first experiences writing SQL.

Writing code was a markedly better DX that building dashboards in Tableau, which is why I'm now working on https://evidence.dev - a SSG for creating data from SQL and markdown

Previous HN discussions:

I'm one of the founders of Evidence (https://evidence.dev) - would be great to hear about your experience. Reaching out now!

Full fledged BI tools like Superset and Metabase are amazing for their intended use cases.

But they may be an overkill if your primary use case is to infrequently build semi-interactive reports for non-technical end-users and your use cases are are mostly covered by standard graphs & tables. Esp. so if you are familiar with SQL and have access to the underlying data source. Two nifty utilities I have found to be very useful for latter kind of use cases are SQLPage and Evidence.

They make it very convenient to whip out some SQL and convert that to a neat professional looking web ui that can be forwarded to an end user. In case of Evidence it is a statically generated site, and in case of SQLPage it is a web app that connects to a live database.

SQLPage: https://sql.ophir.dev/

Evidence: https://evidence.dev

We used ECharts to build our charting library at Evidence and it’s been a great experience overall (https://evidence.dev).

We started with D3 and a few other tools, but felt that we get a lot more out of the box with ECharts, like interactivity and an events API. ECharts is also a lot more extensible than people give it credit for.

If anyone is curious, we documented the process of selecting a charting library after assessing several options: https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence/issues/136

The new direction seems very similar to what evidence has been doing for a while

https://evidence.dev

I'm quite excited about this, and would also love to have it distributed as an NPM package.

I work on an OSS web framework for reporting/ decision support applications (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence), and we use WASM duckDB as our query engine. Several folks have asked for PRQL support, and this looks like it could be a pretty seamless way to add it.

> Not sure the language you choose matters as much as making the API usable by a wide audience.

Fully agree with this, and having typeset my masters thesis and later my resume using LaTeX, I think that the “authoring experience” is 100% the place to focus on improving.

If you’re interested in the “markup to document publishing” space, you might also be interested in the open-source report publishing tool I’m now working on, Evidence (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence)

It’s similarly based on markdown, though uses code fences to execute code, HTML style tags for charts and components, and {…} for JavaScript, i.e.

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Docusaurus is a popular open-source documentation tool primarily designed for product documentation and other technical documentation needs. It was first released in 2017 by Facebook Open Source (now Meta Open Source). Just recently, Docsaurus version 3.0 was released.

// @ts-check // `@type` JSDoc annotations allow editor autocompletion and type checking // (when paired with `@ts-check`). // There are various equivalent ways to declare your Docusaurus config. // See: https://docusaurus.io/docs/api/docusaurus-config import { themes as prismThemes } from "prism-react-renderer"; /** @type {import('@docusaurus/types').Config} */ const config = { title: "My Site", tagline: "Dinosaurs are cool", url: "https://your-docusaurus-test-site.com", baseUrl: "/", onBrokenLinks: "throw", onBrokenMarkdownLinks: "warn", favicon: "img/favicon.ico", organizationName: "facebook", // Usually your GitHub org/user name. projectName: "docusaurus", // Usually your repo name. presets: [ [ "docusaurus-preset-openapi", /** @type {import('docusaurus-preset-openapi').Options} */ ({ docs: { sidebarPath: require.resolve("./sidebars.js"), // Please change this to your repo. editUrl: "https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/tree/main/packages/create-docusaurus/templates/shared/", }, blog: { showReadingTime: true, // Please change this to your repo. editUrl: "https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/tree/main/packages/create-docusaurus/templates/shared/", }, theme: { customCss: require.resolve("./src/css/custom.css"), }, }), ], ], themeConfig: /** @type {import('docusaurus-preset-openapi').ThemeConfig} */ ({ navbar: { title: "My Site", logo: { alt: "My Site Logo", src: "img/logo.svg", }, items: [ { type: "doc", docId: "intro", position: "left", label: "Tutorial", }, { to: "/api", label: "API", position: "left" }, { to: "/blog", label: "Blog", position: "left" }, { href: "https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus", label: "GitHub", position: "right", }, ], }, footer: { style: "dark", links: [ { title: "Docs", items: [ { label: "Tutorial", to: "/docs/intro", }, ], }, { title: "Community", items: [ { label: "Stack Overflow", href: "https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/docusaurus", }, { label: "Discord", href: "https://discordapp.com/invite/docusaurus", }, { label: "Twitter", href: "https://twitter.com/docusaurus", }, ], }, { title: "More", items: [ { label: "Blog", to: "/blog", }, { label: "GitHub", href: "https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus", }, ], }, ], copyright: `Copyright © ${new Date().getFullYear()} My Project, Inc. Built with Docusaurus.`, }, prism: { theme: prismThemes.github, darkTheme: prismThemes.dracula, }, }), }; export default config;

Facebook's React/Markdown SSG docusaurus does those things: https://docusaurus.io/

Though you may have to use a plugin for responsive images: https://docusaurus.io/docs/api/plugins/@docusaurus/plugin-id...

Docusaurus is an open-source static site generator built on React and has emerged as a popular tool for developing and maintaining product documentation. Its ease of use, extensive features, and robust community support make it a compelling choice for many organizations.

Wondering why Docusaurus (https://docusaurus.io) did not match their needs. Works perfectly fine as a blogging engine for our tech blog.

This is developed by Meta. You can create really nice-looking documentation websites super fast.

Docusaurus, a documentation tool by Facebook, hosts a showcase of other websites that use Docusaurus on their Homepage. The list of websites of this showcase is a typescript files that is maintained by Docusaurus devs, and that you can add your website to through PR: https://github.com/facebook/docusaurus/blob/main/website/src/data/users.tsx

Fix "Edit this page" links at the bottom of each doc (Problem with the Docusaurus build I guess)