graderjs VS clog

This is very polished and cool looking. Inspiring. I find this project's level of polish very inspiring.

It's lovely to see someone has captured this idea and expressed it in the right way to make it interesting to many people. I really hope this mode of desktop apps can take off, at least to the level where the community has something to explore for a while to see if it works. I made something like this for Chrome browsers a while ago, nodejs backends, vanilla front-ends, built-in packaging using pkg. It's just a nice approach: https://github.com/dosyago/graderjs

And I made a demo using the venerable MS Paint clone JS Paint^0. The dev experience was great, I literally just dropped in the front-end code to the right folder, compiled it and wham, "desktop JS paint" on 3 platforms, haha.

Using the ubiquitous local browser as the rendering / API engine for desktop just seems smart. And it's technically interesting, because you get to think in terms of how can you step back from the browser, the platform, the front-end and the back-end and come up with a general API that addresses all of it, which is kinda cool.

0: https://github.com/00000o1/jspaint.exe

Client / Server Web App: Node.JS, Bang.html[0], the filesystem

Native downloadable executable desktop GUI application: Node.JS, GraderJS

CLI app: ??? Don't know yet, GraderJS can work but it's focused around GUI

Mobile app: ??? Don't know yet

Embedded: ??? Don't know yet

Graphics: Processing (but surely there are much better options nowadays)

AI: ??? Don't know yet

[0]: https://github.com/crisdosyago/bang.html/

[1]: https://github.com/crisdosyago/graderjs/

I'm working on an alternative. It's a slightly different take, but provides similar functionality of Node.js plus front end code in a packaged binary. Instead of using a weird custom fork of chrome and downloading that for every different binary we just use the system Chrome browser (or install it once for all apps). Eventually we can probably expand to use other Chrome browsers or even other web driver supported browsers which Firefox seems to be building that support out. I just like the idea of using something that's already on the system.

Take a look at the wonderful GraderJS, heh :)

https://github.com/crisdosyago/graderjs

For those who didn't reach the end of the README.md, it seems to use an electron-alternative called grader, from the same author:

https://github.com/i5ik/graderjs

It runs server and downloads Chrome (if not available already) and starts it in app mode.

It is a good idea but it is not a new idea

the interesting history of these sorts of frameworks is that Google actually created a framework that did this and stopped development on it. the code is still on GitHub. And there's a bunch of other frameworks that use a variety of different languages not just rust as the application language that also have this idea of not bundling chromium but instead using the system webview for rendering HTML and JavaScript.

You can find a bunch of different approaches in lists like "alternatives to electron." There's some on GitHub.

I took a slightly different approach where instead of using the system web view which I thought you know is going to be inconsistent across systems and it's not going to support the latest HTML JavaScript and security features I used the assumption that the user already has chrome installed which works in a high number of cases or can download and install it if that's not the case. predictably I suppose some people express to satisfaction that it was not using Firefox. using Firefox becomes more possible and more likely I suppose as firefox's support for the dev tools protocol achieves parity with chrome support for that.

https://github.com/c9fe/graderjs

Reminds me of the approach of CLOG (Common Lisp Omnificent Gui[1]) and its ancestor GNOGA (The GNU Omnificent GUI for Ada[2]).

They also integrate basic components and even graphical UI editor (at least for CLOG), so you can essentially develop the whole thing from inside CL or Ada

[1] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

[2] https://github.com/alire-project/gnoga

For me David Botton [0] with his work including code, support and videos is doing very nice work in this direction.

I use SBCL for everything but work because I cannot get; we are getting there, but like you say, it’s such a nice experience working interactively building fast that it is magic and it’s painful returning to my daily work of Python and typescript/react. It feels like a waste of time/life, really.

[0] https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog

I was following along on the Windows page and didn't check back on the main README to see if any of the other instructions would help.

It the answer is "latter", then you could look at Common Lisp and Reblocks (https://40ants.com/reblocks/) or CLOG (https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog).

I haven't used Clojure professionally in 10 years so with a grain of salt here are my thoughts as only one other person answered...

CL over Clojure: it's the OG Lisp that the creator of Clojure used and wanted to continue using but faced too much resistance from management afraid of anything not-Java/not-Oracle, or not-CLR/not-Microsoft, etc. Clojure shipped originally as "just another jar" so devs could "sneak" it in. If you don't have such a management restriction, why Clojure? If you want to integrate CL with the JVM, you can use the ABCL implementation, there's also something from one of the proprietary Lisps. Some useful CL features that are nice in this domain: conditions and restarts mentioned in a sibling comment (very nice to help interactively develop/debug e.g. a selenium webdriver test), ability to easily compile an exe (perhaps useful for microservices, or just to keep your deployment environment clean and not having to care about Lisp), and ability to easily ship with an open local socket allowing you to SSH in (or SSH port forward) and debug/fix/poke around in production (JVM of course lets you attach debuggers to a running process, even certain billion+ dollar companies will have supervised/limited prod debugging sessions for various hairy cases, but it's not as interactive). You should never hear CL advocates claim you can't scale to large teams/groups of engineers or large multi-million-lines sized projects, though you might oddly hear Clojure advocates sometimes claim you can't (and shouldn't) scale to such large projects -- large groups of engineers are a non-issue for them as well though, the challenge is in hiring, not in the language somehow making it impossible to modularize and keep people from stepping on each other.

Clojure over CL: its integration with the JVM is nicer than ABCL's, so if you do actually want a lot of the great world of Java stuff, it's easier to get at. Database integration libraries are better. Access to libs (Clojure or Java) is via Maven, so it's a larger ecosystem with more self-integrating components (especially around monitoring/metrics) than what's available for Lisp via Quicklisp. Clojure is very opinionated, much of it quite tasteful, and that gives the whole ecosystem a certain consistency. (You can have immutable data structures in CL, you can if you want use [] for literal vectors and make them syntactically important e.g. in let bindings, but not everyone will be on board.) Even though its popularity seems to have stopped growing, at least at the same rate as e.g. Go which it was keeping pace with for a while, it's still popular enough with a bigger community; as a proxy measure there are multiple conferences around the world and good talks at adjacent conferences, whereas Lisp mostly just has one conference in Europe per year and only occasional branching outside of that.

If you're doing a client-side-heavy webapp, ClojureScript is still amazing, CL's answers there aren't very compelling with the exception of CLOG (https://github.com/rabbibotton/clog) which takes an entirely different direction than the usual idea of translating/running Lisp on top of JavaScript and its popular frameworks.