Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: libmodulor – An opinionated TS library to build multi-platform apps

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–29 of 29 posts

Re: Show HN: libmodulor – An opinionated TS library to build multi-platform apps

#21

Post by yasserf »

gervwyk wrote: post #17
yasserf wrote: post #4

Looks great! I build something similar (vramework.dev), actually on my way now to give a talk on it Got a presentation for it at presentation.vramework.dev if anyone is interested

interesting, when you say websocket support on aws, does this mean ws using lambda? and ws on nextjs (would be a game changer if someone made this happen)

Yes it’s ws using lambda, the worker-starter example shows how it works

Also abstracts away the idea of an eventbus which is pretty critical in any Websocket deployment.

It doesn’t use Websocket directly via Vercel, but would work if you use nextjs by providing it a http server and also providing that server to ws

Can get this to work, but I’m pretty curious why you think this is a game changer? Thanks!

Re: Show HN: libmodulor – An opinionated TS library to build multi-platform apps

#22

Post by yasserf »

yasserf wrote: post #19
sramam wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

vramework looks really well thought out. Is it in use by anyone yet?

Heya! It’s used in three companies so far, but the new productised (via the cli) version is still in development / qa stages There is one company that has been using it for over four years tho! Just checked in and seems to be working solid

The difference between the two versions is that we now have a cli, whereas before you needed to call scripts to do the same things

Re: Show HN: libmodulor – An opinionated TS library to build multi-platform apps

#23

Post by yasserf »

yasserf wrote: post #21
gervwyk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting, when you say websocket support on aws, does this mean ws using lambda? and ws on nextjs (would be a game changer if someone made this happen)

Yes it’s ws using lambda, the worker-starter example shows how it works Also abstracts away the idea of an eventbus which is pretty critical in any Websocket deployment. It doesn’t use Websocket directly via Vercel, but would work if you use nextjs by providing it a http server and also providing that server to ws Can get this to work, but I’m pretty curious why you think this is a game changer? Thanks!

Also curious how you would want Websocket servers to talk to each other (to broadcast messages). Would you be okay having a pub sub layer like redis that nestjs servers run on?

Also is running on vercel a requirement?

Re: Show HN: libmodulor – An opinionated TS library to build multi-platform apps

#24

Post by gervwyk »

yasserf wrote: post #21
gervwyk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

interesting, when you say websocket support on aws, does this mean ws using lambda? and ws on nextjs (would be a game changer if someone made this happen)

Yes it’s ws using lambda, the worker-starter example shows how it works Also abstracts away the idea of an eventbus which is pretty critical in any Websocket deployment. It doesn’t use Websocket directly via Vercel, but would work if you use nextjs by providing it a http server and also providing that server to ws Can get this to work, but I’m pretty curious why you think this is a game changer? Thanks!

Nice. I’m going to look into this more. We currently run a dedicated server next to our vercel apps just for ws support. Adds considerable overhead.

Maybe game changer is an exaggeration but In the vercel community, ws has been a top requested feature for years. See comments on https://x.com/rauchg/status/1872729115595587627

Re: Show HN: libmodulor – An opinionated TS library to build multi-platform apps

#25

Post by pmdfgy »

0x20cowboy wrote: post #11

I find most often people who are opinionated have very little knowledge on the subject. They are opinionated in an effort to try to keep discussions in a realm they feel they have some sort of expertise, but by definition their limited view makes them look silly to those with deeper understanding. I apologise for being off topic, but I really want “an opinionated X” to stop having some kind of positive connotation to…

I'm not sure there is a relation between a program/library to be "opinionated" vs the skillset of the person who created it.

In my case, I'm using the word because the library defines a set of rules and conventions to follow. They are indeed based on my experience.

Are they perfect ? Probably not. And I'm totally open to review them if I missed things. That's how we all learn. Like any model (in a mathematical way), it is an approximation of the actual problem.

Re: Show HN: libmodulor – An opinionated TS library to build multi-platform apps

#26

Post by pmdfgy »

gr4vityWall wrote: post #10

Congrats on your project. I feel like you could describe the abstractions you built in more detail. When I read the explanation for what the 'UseCase', 'App', 'Product' and 'Target' were, it wasn't clear how each of those translates to TypeScript. My guess is that 'UseCase' and 'App' would be like Classes, if you're modeling your program in an OOP way? The 'Product' seems like it would be the TypeScript project itsel…

> it wasn't clear how each of those translates to TypeScript

That's a fair point. I will add more details on how each of these notions translates to TypeScript. Quickly :

  - UseCase : a file containing the use case definition
  - App : a directory with a use cases folders and metadata (i18n, metadata)
  - Product : a directory with a apps folders and metadata (i18n, metadata)
  - Target : depends on it by for a GUI it's the screens where use cases are injected
> I would rethink how you named the 'App' layer

I'm not a huge fan of this name either, but couldn't come up with something better at this time. `Module` seemed to broad to me. Although the notion is not totally clear to you, do you have any ideas in mind ?

I agree that it's not as straightforward as other solutions at this moment. I'll keep working and improving this to reduce the time needed to get started.

Re: Show HN: libmodulor – An opinionated TS library to build multi-platform apps

#27

Post by pmdfgy »

tomhallett wrote: post #9
pmdfgy wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your feedback, I really appreciate. Let's say you want to create a product with auth and crud for contacts. You'll have a SignInUCD, a CreateContactUCD, a AddPhoneNumberToContactUCD, etc. As you said, your react-native target will define the UI screens. You are free to design them the way you want as the library does not make any assumptions about the UI/UX. In every screen where you want to "inject" a…

Let's say I'm using shadcn's Dialog [1] on my web target, which has many subcomponents (Dialog, DialogTrigger, DialogHeader, etc). How many of those am i representing with a 1-to-1 `UC`? Is it just the parts that are on the IO seam, like a UC for opening the dialog, UC for closing a dialog, and UC for submitting a dialog? Or is it also for things the user sees like UC for header, UC for content, UC for buttons panel?…

Let's take the first example here : https://ui.shadcn.com/docs/components/dialog. In this case, you have only one UC named EditProfileUCD, with the following input => name: PersonFullname and username: Username. All the things related to "UI" are not use cases since they are specific to a GUI target. A good tip to see if something is a UC or not : it should be available on all platforms. Opening a dialog in a Terminal is not for instance.

To continue with this example, you would add a in your webpage, referencing EditProfileUCD. According to the client policy defined in the UCD and the UC auth, the button "Edit Profile" will show up or not. You can also simply disable it.

And your Dialog would render a that will display the form based on the UC input. Check out the contract of UCPanel (https://github.com/c100k/libmodulor/tree/master/dist/esm/tar...) to see how you can design the form and the form fields. Ideally, you would design these only once, and use across your whole codebase.

> said in another way: many of the people on HN have a backend api, a react SPA, and a mobile app. what types of problems do i have now which libmodulor solves?

In this typical architecture, you would benefit a lot from libmodulor. All your business functionality would be expressed as individual use cases, organized in apps corresponding to your business domain. You would have a server target (backend api), a react-web target (react SPA), a react-native target (mobile app). Each of them will bind the appropriate things in their container. The API endpoints will be automatically mounted in your backend API. They correspond to UCDs having a server lifecycle. Adding a in react web or react-native will render the same UC for each platform and submit it automatically to the server, without you having to do any plumging whatsoever. You are totally free to expose a UC in web but not in react-native.

> do i get a mono-build-system, where everything flows together and i just say "libmodulor build" and "libmodulor deploy" and I'm good to go?

This is clearly an important part that is non-existent at this time. For my own products for instance, I deploy each based on the target used (push on a PaaS for a server target, webpack/vite for a web target, fastlane for a react-native target, etc.)

If you have some time, I highly recommend to follow the "Getting Started", showing you how you can multiply the targets, re-using the apps as is.

Thanks a lot for your questions, they help me a lot to see where I fail to explain and how I can simplify things.

Re: Show HN: libmodulor – An opinionated TS library to build multi-platform apps

#28

Post by yasserf »

gervwyk wrote: post #24
yasserf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it’s ws using lambda, the worker-starter example shows how it works Also abstracts away the idea of an eventbus which is pretty critical in any Websocket deployment. It doesn’t use Websocket directly via Vercel, but would work if you use nextjs by providing it a http server and also providing that server to ws Can get this to work, but I’m pretty curious why you think this is a game changer? Thanks!

Nice. I’m going to look into this more. We currently run a dedicated server next to our vercel apps just for ws support. Adds considerable overhead. Maybe game changer is an exaggeration but In the vercel community, ws has been a top requested feature for years. See comments on https://x.com/rauchg/status/1872729115595587627

I raised an issue here https://github.com/vramework/vramework/issues/119, feel free to add any info that can help.

Note to self: need to signup to X!

If deploying off of vercel is acceptable, it can be done pretty nicely via serverless-nextjs or nextjs docker in one server. But from what I understand vercel internally does quite a bit of code analysis to split things and I don't really want to get too deep into the weeds in that direction

Thank you for raising!

Re: Show HN: libmodulor – An opinionated TS library to build multi-platform apps

#29

Post by pmdfgy »

Based on your feedback, I've released v0.4.0.

It includes a simple react-native target to show how to do it. To make things easier to understand, I've also revamped the documentation, added a Guide to create your own target and enhanced the Tutorial with a RN target.

Finally, I've added the Tutorial code in the repo for whoever wants to browse it without necessarily performing all the steps.

Thanks a lot again for your feedback. My email is open :)

Post reply on HN