moja VS GoJS, a JavaScript Library for HTML Diagrams

I want sum types.

I want a statically-typed way of constructing composable queries that follow SQL rather than reinvent a different thing. It doesn't have to be the same syntax but it has to be the same structuring.

I started writing one[0] and stopped before doing all the boilerplate code generation, having moved on from the JVM ecosystem for the time being. One thing it does is treat most things like sets so we don't end up with N+1 queries. Another trick it uses is collapsing constant expressions via an expression evaluation library[1].

[0] https://github.com/karmakaze/safeql

[1] https://github.com/karmakaze/moja

Over the years, I've written many apps and utilities for myself or others (that didn't end up get used). These are the interesting ones I remember. Many not quite complete/usable. Other than hackerer.news none of them are 'up' and running. Some have and others haven't been published as opensource.

- https://hackerer.news HN viewer (source[0]): I use daily so I can see today's top stories in reverse chronological order with mainstream topics sorted to the bottom.

- qwickly[1] keyboard layout: I use all the time as an easier to learn and more comfortable to type than Colemak/Tarmak

- safeql[2]: Java type-safe SQL expression composer that reduces constant expressions and eliminates N+1 queries loading associations by always operating on set relation or array of models.

- moja[3]: Composable computation pipelines for Java: Async, Lazy, Option, Try, Result, Multi (List), Stated, Reader, Logger, Writer.

- gitgrep.com[4] Opensource SaaS version of etsy/houndd (now called hound-search).

- statuspages.me: Status page aggregator with dynamic javascript for scraping each source using selector expressions.

- movies to watch aggregator: with links to sources to watch. It was hard then to get 3rd party deep links into streaming sites so included some torrent links. Got a DMCA phone call, so took it down. Combined thumbnails, summaries, actors(?), imdb ratings, links.

- java2cpp: Translate a moderately sized java app with test suite to c++, not 100% required final manual fixups.

- swift2java (or maybe it was java2swift, it's fuzzy now): translate Swift to Java obviously, using ANTLR4. Not 100% required final manual fixups.

- gui2log: to make an ASCII rendition of on-screen GUI widgets into an application log file when form submitted, so users couldn't complain that they saw X, but got Y.

- some basic stats/ML algorithms: k-nearest neighbour, RNN back-propagation, etc?

- Java in-memory DB: Small SQL-like memory tables with indexing/searching.

- wwwsqldesigner: This exists as opensource and I extended it to infer foreign key relationships based on naming conventions used in a MySQL schema. It was great for zooming around a large ERD.

- tracelog: combination of microservices parent/child span logging and generated high level events shown as a sequence diagram. Integrated with Loggly for full/verbose logs of selected high-level events.

- pcl2bmp downscaler: Reduce high resolution HP LaserJet (PCL5) printed to file to lower resolution bitmap pages for screen display (before retina DPI was common). It aimed to shrink same-color areas and preserve black/white transitions while reducing.

[0] https://gitlab.com/karmakaze/hackerer-news

[1] https://github.com/qwickly-org/Qwickly

[2] https://github.com/karmakaze/safeql

[3] https://github.com/karmakaze/moja

[4] https://github.com/gitgrep-com/gitgrep

Sure, SafeQL[0] SQL library. It's been sitting in a close but not enough to promote state for a while. The main thing I wanted was to have generation of the bindings to existing DB schema. I also want to combine using Moja[1] datatypes for uniform handling of single/multi, normal/async, and errors.

[0] https://github.com/karmakaze/safeql

[1] https://github.com/karmakaze/moja

I made a similar thing for Java moja Options as needed other projects. It sort-of works but it's not great.

Have spent six figures yearly on ads, mostly for reach for the developer-focused diagram library GoJS (https://gojs.net)

> Each experiment will need ~$500 and 2 weeks

I would add a zero if you want serious data. I would also double the timescale. $5,000 over 4 weeks

I second the uselessness of Google Display, it might look like conversions numbers are good but they are 100% too good to be true. As soon as you look into them you find the sources are things like "ad from HappyFunBabyTime Android app". You have to ruthlessly prune daily for months to get anything real, and even then I'm skeptical of value. For a developer tool with very strict conversion metrics!

But I disagree on Google Search:

> Good for conversion, bad for awareness.

Before we were popular it was excellent for awareness. Post popularity its much more arguable.

Creating the Halogen components would be simple enough if one takes inspiration from gojs-react. The issue is that there are no PureScript bindings for the GoJS types themselves, but GoJS does provide .ts.d declarations, which means I could use purescript-read-dts, but that library's maturity/usability seems somewhat ambiguous, according to an author's post from 3 years ago.

used goJS in one project and konva in another

I built GoJS, which is one of the most popular commercial JS diagramming libraries: https://gojs.net

I built carefulwords, a very fast thesaurus and quote site for inspiration, used by... tens of people a day. Eg: https://carefulwords.com/gift https://carefulwords.com/solitude

I mostly made it for myself, me and my wife use it all the time. I am slowly editing down the thesaurus to managable size.

I built a 12x16 "Goose Palace" barn out of local pine timbers, which taught me timber framing, and taught my tiny baby who turned 2 years old while doing it that this is just the kind of thing that people normally do, build barns in their driveway. Some context: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/the-goose-palace

Some photos of building it with the baby: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1584169368203956225

I designed my house, and have been writing extensively about that. Maybe this is the most impactful, since photos of it are all over Pinterest and other sites, now. The first post on that: https://simonsarris.substack.com/p/designing-a-new-old-home-...

I am not sure what is most impactful. Maybe ultimately it is building my family.

I made a pull request for GoJS (https://gojs.net)

I have been building this canvas-based graphing library since 2011, and it contains a good number of features around customization and interactivity that are not found in other libraries. It is commercial for non-academic use however.

in one project we use konva, in another we used gojs. Any of them or some other library needs some training and introduce own limitations but it still way way way better than handing all the coordinates, calculations, routing etc on your own.

I am really surprised by this guy's opinion. I make GoJS (https://gojs.net/), a diagramming library written in TypeScript. The project began in 2011 and we converted it to TS in 2018. It's been a huge plus. The sole downside was the initial time it took during conversion, but even in doing so we caught bugs with incorrect input types, documentation mistakes, etc.

On our end, it enforces type safety better than the Google Closure Compiler. There has scarcely been a problem with type complexity that was not ultimately our fault. Just a couple minor things that TS amended later. For that matter the TS experience has only gotten better, generally.

On our users end, we can now give them a .d.ts file that's much richer and easier for us to produce to aid their autocompletion. And we can use that .d.ts file to ensure that all the methods we intended to expose/minify are getting exposed. The advantages with the .d.ts and documentation make it feel almost essential to me for library developers to consider TS.

TypeScript has only made debugging easier, much easier since it catches errors at time of typing unlike the closure compiler. The sole exception is that debugging is a bit slower since I have to transpile instead of just refreshing the browser. But I have tsc set to compile a relatively unminified version of the JS. But if the slowness gets to me, I can just edit the JS output until I solve the issue, and then carry those edits over to the TS. This has never felt like a problem, though maybe his library is significantly more complicated.

Feel free to ask me anything if you have questions about library design + TS.

GoJS might work for you: https://gojs.net

Although the focus of the library is interactivity and not setting up sequences of animation, but that is possible too.

My livelihood has been primarily building a Canvas diagramming library since 2010 (https://gojs.net), if anyone has any questions about 2D Canvas use in the real-world I'd be happy to answer them.

roundRect is great. Though you don't need 4 arcTo in order to make a rounded rect, you can use bezier instead (we do). Their example is also 1% amusing because they set the `fillStyle` but then call `stroke` (and not `fill`). I'll have to do some performance comparisons, since that's the operative thing for my use case (and any library author).

text modifiers are very welcome. It's crazy how annoying measuring still is, especially if you want thinks to look perfectly consistent across browsers. Though the chrome dominance is making things easier in one way, I guess.

context.reset is kinda funny. Most high-performance canvas apps will never want to use it. For that matter you want to set all properties as little as possible, especially setting things like context.font, which are slow even if you're setting it to the same value. (Or it was, I haven't tested that in several years).

I'm sure most users know this by now, but generally for performance the fewer calls you make to the canvas and the context, the beter. This is even true of transforms: It's faster to make your own Matrix class, do all your own matrix translation, rotation, multiplication, etc, and then make a single call to `context.setTransform`, than it is to call the other context methods.

I have some problem with gojs(https://gojs.net/),