Gradle buildSrcVersions VS vugu

Lately I've been using gradle with kotlin-js and a mix of npm and jvm dependencies. There's the https://splitties.github.io/refreshVersions/ plugin that I can recommend if you are using gradle (with or without kotlin-js).

It manages plugin dependencies, library dependencies, and version dependencies. It can use the new gradle version catalog or not if you prefer. On first use, you migrate your versions and it extracts these to a versions.properties (or your version catalog). Then whenever you run refreshVersions it indicates available new versions in comments in this file. It also indicates unused dependencies. Though for npms this is a bit harder. All you need to do is manually use the versions you want.

I run this frequently to stay on top of upstream changes. Few software engineers realize that the testing and integration overhead with version changes multiplies (just like with other forms of change). Libraries that you haven't updated amount to technical debt that you haven't addressed. So, the workload increases massively if you don't update for a while. Staying up to date minimizes the workload. This plugin makes that super easy.

Given that we are using kotlin-js, we have to deal with a rapidly evolving library ecosystem so we do have occasional issues that we need to work around by either downgrading or fixing some code. Whenever I can't update something, I document it in my versions.properties with a comment. Often you just have to wait for the next release or so for things to straighten out. The price of using cutting edge software.

Kotlin-js manages a yarn lock file as well. So it properly locks dependencies. Whenever you update npm dependencies, you have to run a command to upgrade the lock file. There's also a whole mess of webpack dependencies that comes along with kotlin-js.

{$% embed https://github.com/splitties/refreshVersions %}

I need a Gradle plugin for managing version upgrades for dependencies. I used refreshVersions; however, I don't like how those dependencies end up in multiple files, e.g., versions.properties vs lib.versions.toml. I want something simpler. So, what do you prefer?

As somebody with a deep personal hatred of TOML I recommend refreshVersions https://github.com/jmfayard/refreshVersions just a million times better and will support version catalogs soon maybe

refreshVersions, it is literally the best

Note that I'm using gradle refreshVersions to make it easy to keep the project up-to-date. Therefore, the versions are not defined in the build.gradle files, they are centralized in the versions.properties file. RefreshVersions is bootstrapped like this in settings.gradle.kts:

Also the official sample for gradle refreshVersions

I can't share any of my own examples, but most of the work I do was originally based on Vugu[0] which is open source. It is loosely modelled on Vue, so template files have both HTML and Go source (for the view / front end / ui handling) in the one file.[1] The code I have written has since diverged a bit from Vugu but at its core it's handled the same way.

People are still working on Vugu (you can check the issues / branches) but there hasn't been a new release in a while; it's still somewhat experimental.

[0] https://www.vugu.org/

. Web backend (with various frameworks available) . Web Assembly (one of them is vugu framework) . Microservices (some frameworks: Go Micro, Go Kit, Gizmo, Kite) . Fragments services (Term mentioned by @jeffotoni in a microservices discussion group) . Lambdas (FaaS example) . Client Server . Terminal applications (using the tview lib) . IoT (some frameworks) . Bots (some here) . Client Applications using Web technology . Desktop using Qt+QML, Native Win Lib (example Qt, Qt widgets, Qml) . Network Applications . Protocol applications . REST Applications . SOAP Applications . GraphQL Applications . RPC Applications . TCP Applications . gRPC Applications . WebSocket Applications . GopherJS (compiles Go to JavaScript)

Aside from Blazor there's already some other projects like Yew (rust), seed (rust), asm-dom (C++) and vugu (Go) and more that have decent followings and activity. A lot more (especially managed languages) are waiting for some features to come online like wasm GC and host bindings (direct wasm access to browser apis which includes the DOM). It'll take a bit of time, but it'll get there eventually.

Vugu

It depends on how specifically you don't want to write HTML/CSS/JS and how broad your definition of "frontend" is. There are a handful of all-go frontend frameworks such as Vecty and Vugu of varying maturity and completeness. Then there's other libraries that more or less have you write HTML tags in go, such as go-app.

Something like Vugu looks like it could have some potential.

There is https://www.vugu.org/ It's Vue, but Go instead of JS.

A note on wasm: I'm building a hobby project with it right now and have tried different frameworks, I tried vecty which is nice to compile but full of bugs and unexpected behavior. I'm now on vugu which works better but is still harder to work with than a JS framework.

If you have the option go for https://www.vugu.org/ and use the go language. Much better language started by google in 2006 vs JavaScript which was started in I think 1995?