temple VS entr

One possible solution to this problem is the Free, Open Source Software community continuing to work toward more sophisticated tech that can bridge the gap between popular server-side languages for Web Dev and native platforms. PhoneGap was a failure because it was JS running on the phone, rather than compiling to something faster and with a more “native feel”. React Native is, IMHO, not that much better (and the React ecosystem has ridiculous fragmentation and churn). Flutter seems cool, but Dart is not a popular server-side language (and from what I heard anecdotally, Flutter also has API complexity and churn).

Personally, I think Elixir is a natural choice for this kind of task (disclosure: I am incredibly biased in my love for Elixir).

Macro-based DSLs are not beloved by all, but they can take you pretty far with minimal overhead, since you can theoretically target multiple platforms without even having to ship a custom runtime to the phone. Aside from the language itself, there is a great community, less fragmentation and churn, and a tendency to build thoughtful, robust libraries and frameworks with good docs.

For inspiration, take a look at Mitch Hanberg’s Temple project[0] which compiles valid Elixir code to something that eventually gets turned into HTML.

DockYard is also doing really cool, bleeding edge stuff with LiveView Native[1], even if it’s a bit early to predict how viable it will be for large, complex apps.

[0]https://github.com/mhanberg/temple

[1] https://dockyard.com/blog/2022/09/01/dockyard-r-d-build-elix...

I recently also found temple and I really like the idea. I mean, Elixir is great for DSLs, why not to use it. For example, we already kinda use it for SQL, thanks to Ecto. However, the latest issue about not supporting the latest liveview and no activity for a while scared me away from actually trying it. Maybe, I should be more brave in picking up seems-to-be-dead projects. Have you tried it?

entr ("Event Notify Test Runner"; GitHub), is a command-line tool written by Eric Radman that allows running arbitrary commands whenever files change.

I use something very similar on https://lunar.fyi and https://lowtechguys.com but I wouldn’t call this “simple” anymore.

They use Jinja templating, I prefer Slim (https://github.com/slim-template/slim#syntax-example) which has a more Pythonic syntax (there is plim [0] in Python for that)

I use Tailwind as well for terse styling and fast experimentation (allows me to write a darkMode-aware and responsive 100 line CSS in a single line with about 10 classes)

For interaction I can write CoffeeScript directly in the page [1] and have it compiled by plim.

I run a Caddy static server [2] and use Syncthing [3] to have every file save deployed instantly to my Hetzner server.

I use entr [4] and livereloadx [5] to rebuild the pages and do hot reload on file save. All the commands are managed in a simple Makefile [6]

———

You can already see how the footnotes take up a large chunk of this comment, this is not my idea of simple. Sure, the end result is readable static HTML and I never have to fight obscure React errors, but it’s a high effort setup for starters.

Simple for me would be: write markdown files for pages, a simple CSS for general styling (should be optional), click to deploy on my domain. Images should automatically be resized to multiple sizes and optimized, videos re-encoded for smaller filesize etc.

I have mostly implemented that for myself (https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/How%20I%20write%20this%20blog...) but it feels fragile. I’d rather pay for a professional solution.

[0] https://plim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[1] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/src/rcmd...

[2] https://caddyserver.com/docs/command-line#caddy-file-server

[3] https://syncthing.net

[4] https://github.com/eradman/entr

[5] https://nitoyon.github.io/livereloadx/

[6] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/lowtechguys/blob/main/Makefile

Try entr for fast reloading. Another one is hupper.

entr