vite-elm-template VS browser

After that point I started looking into how Elm works from the web dev perspective with resources like Elm in Action and Frontend Masters courses (first working in ellie-app-for-elm-dev then upgrading to vite-elm-template).

Using vanilla HTML and JS is nice, but most of the time at work or in larger projects we're using some sort of build tooling to have a more streamlined experience. I'm personally a big fan of Vite, the frontend tooling solution by the creator of Vue. I maintain a Vite template for building Elm applications, which utilized the excellent Elm plugin for Vite to achieve hot module reload and directly importing our .elm files into our Javascript.

This was a template I created to scratch my own itch. As a Vue developer, I love working with Vite, and really wanted a base template for Vite that I could use to build Elm applications. vite-elm-template is a basic Vite template intended to get you started writing in Elm without having to spend time configuring everything yourself. Unlike elm-pages or elm-spa, it's not a framework of any sort. If you want to bring in single-page application features, or other functionalities, you will have to build those in yourself. That said, it's perfect for getting started with a basic environment.

What's going on here? First, we import Platform, which provides us with the function Platform.worker. Most of the time, when writing an Elm app, we're leaning on elm/Browser to create apps that bind to the DOM. But in this case, we don't have a DOM to bind to, so we utilize Platform to create a basic app that doesn't do that. worker takes three inputs: init, update, and subscriptions (it's basically the same as Browser.element, from our Main.elm example).

For example: https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/browser/latest/

A couple of problems that I faced recently were this one concerning long lists in debug mode (https://github.com/elm/browser/issues/90) and an IP address parsing oddity (https://github.com/elm/parser/issues/14#issuecomment-560092383).