Tools I like for creating web apps

I used to dislike creating websites. CSS confused me and JavaScript annoyed me.

In the last year I’ve grown to like web development again! The developer tools available in the web browsers of 2019 are incredible to work with. The desktop world is catching up, but but the browser world is ahead. I rarely have to write CSS at all. JavaScript has gained a lot of the features that it was inexplicably missing.

Here’s a list of the technologies I’ve recently used and liked.

First, Bootstrap. It’s really a set of CSS classes which turn HTML into something that “works out of the box” for creating decently styled webapps. To me it feels like a well-designed widget toolkit, a kind of web counterpart to GTK. Once you know what Bootstrap looks like, you realize that everyone else is already using it. Thanks to Bootstrap, I don’t really need to understand CSS at all anymore. Once you get bored of the default theme, you can try some others.

Then, jQuery. I guess everyone in the world uses jQuery. It provides powerful methods to access JavaScript functionality that is otherwise horrible to use. One of its main features is the ability to select elements from a HTML document using CSS selectors. Normally jQuery provides a function named $, so for example you could get the text of every paragraph in a document like this: $('p').text().  Open up your browser’s inspector and try it now! Now, try to do the same thing without jQuery — you’ll need at least 6 times more code.¹

After that, Riot.js. Riot is a UI library which lets you create a web page using building blocks which they call custom tags. Each custom tag is a snippet of HTML. You can attach JavaScript properties and methods to a custom tag as well, and you can refer to them in the snippet of HTML giving you a powerful client-side template framework.

There are lots of “frameworks” which provide similar functionality to Riot.js. I find frameworks a bit overwhelming, and I’m suspicious of tools like create-react-app that need to generate code for me before I can even get started. I like that Riot can run completely in the browser without any special tooling required, and that it has one, specific purpose. Riot isn’t perfect; in particular I find the documentation quite hard to understand at times, but so far I’m enjoying using it.

Finally, lunr.js. Lunr provides a powerful full-text search engine, implemented completely as JavaScript that runs in your users’ web browsers. “Isn’t that a terrible idea?” you think. For large data sets, Lunr is not at all appropriate (you might consider its larger sibling Solr). For a small webapp or prototype, Lunr can work well and can save you from having to write and run a more complex backend service.

If, like I did, you think web development is super annoying due to bad tooling, give it another try! It’s (kind of) fun now!

1. Here’s how it looks without jQuery: Array.map(document.getElementsByTagName('p'), function(e) { return e.textContent; })

Paying money for things

Sometimes it’s hard to make money from software. How do you make money from something that can be copied infinitely?

Right now there are 3 software tools that I pay for. Each one is supplied by a small company, and each one charges a monthly or annual fee. I prefer software with this business model because it creates an incentive for careful, ongoing maintenance and improvement. The alternative (pay a large fee, once) encourages a model that is more like “add many new features, sell the new version and then move onto something else”.

The 3 tools are:

1. Feedbin, which is a tool that collects new content from many different blogs and shows them all in a single interface. This is done with a standard called RSS. The tool is a pleasure to use, and best of all, it’s “>Free Software released under a permissive license.
2. Pinboard, a bookmarking and archival tool. The interface doesn’t spark joy and the search tool leaves a lot to be desired too. However, Pinboard carefully archives a copy of every single website that I bookmark, just at the time that I bookmark it. Since the Web is changing all the time and interesting content comes and goes, I find this very valuable. I don’t know if I’ll actually use this archive of content for much as I don’t actually enjoy writing articles particularly, but I use the existance of the archive as a way to convince myself to close browser tabs.
3. Checkvist, a “to do list” tool that supports nesting items, filtering by tags, styling with Markdown, and keyboard-only operation. I use this not as a to-do list but as a way of categorising activities and resources that I use when teaching. To be honest, the “free” tier of this tool is generous enough that I don’t really need to pay, but I like to support the project.

Music can also be copied infinitely, and historically I’ve not been keen to buy it because I didn’t like the very shady operations of many record companies. Now I use Bandcamp, which has an incredible library of music with rich, manually curated recommendations, and a clear, sustainable business model.

What digital goods do you pay for on a regular basis?

 

On uWSGI and metaphors

Today I have spent some time trying to get Django, uWSGI and Cherokee to play nicely together. Ignoring the question of whether Django ever met or performed for any Cherokee people, I’ve found uWSGI to have possibly the creative set of commandline arguments I’ve ever seen. As well as including conditional logic and loops, I can configure jails, the gory details of harakiri, I can create an emperor who manages some vassals (who can optionally be a tyrant), and I can opt to add some mules or indeed start myself a mule farm. The positive-sounding –no-orphans option actually causes uWSGI to “automatically kill workers if master dies” (although it notes that this can be dangerous for availability). I should be careful as my workers can also form a legion.

All in all `uwsgi –help` produces 724 lines of output. I’m yet to actually get it working.

Edit: I got there in end. A couple of key realisations were that the commandline args map exactly to the configuration file format, and that the argument I wanted was provided by the Python plugin which needs to be explicitly installed and enabled. Sadly I’ve not yet had the cause to start myself a mule farm.

The Reader UI is no better.

Really?

On a netbook screen, would there be any room for content at all?