samsaraJS - first look

#21

The code is about 80% stable. I may move things around a bit file structure wise, and bundle it into a single file under the Samsara namespace.

There are some important missing pieces however, that make it unsuitable for serious projects as of now. For one, there’s no ability to remove any content yet, which is pretty darn important. I’d also like to add things, like a physics engine. I was the original author of famous’, but would like to rewrite it and have it be a smaller footprint. The other big thing is to have examples of integrating with Backbone and React, and I have some interesting ideas here to make this integration pleasant, and incredibly easy to maintain. Essentially a small shim layer that associates a Samsara surface with a Backbone (jQuery/zepto) referenced element, or a React component.

The biggest thing right now is documentation. I had reference docs up (http://samsaraJS.org/docs) but there’s a huge nothingness when it comes to prose and high level documentation. So that will be my current focus, followed by the pieces above.

And yes, I suck at marketing. Help spread the word! Even if Samsara isn’t production ready, it’s currently “play” ready!

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#22

Definitely will help spread the word and I like Backbone integration!!!

#23

I gave a talk about SamsaraJS at jsConf EU a few weeks ago. The video just came online, thought I’d put it here. Would love some feedback.

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#24

Thanks for sharing, I have seen the slides before but the video gives a better idea what SamsaraJS is aiming for.

Is anyone here at Infamous is caring?

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#25

Nice talk. I’d say my favorite part was probably when you explained how the render tree was essentially a bunch of streams. Really made everything click.

#26

Thanks! I wish I could have emphasized that point even more. The streaming architecture is the biggest differentiator between SamsaraJS and famous v0.3. It may seem like an implementation detail, but once you start coding it, I hope you’ll see it’s much more.

CSS is a parsed as if it were a state machine, but the layout properties are better thought of as streams. You could say Samsara is a styling stream machine :stuck_out_tongue:

#28

Do you have any plans for creating a ui library based on this, something like ionic?

#29

@sbalbalosa Not at the moment. This is actually the kind of thing I’d love a third-party to make. My focus will be lower-level for a while.

Nothing in Samsara is a one-liner, but it would be super awesome to have ionic-like simplicity to do the common things. I can see someone turning the JSNavigationController demo into a couple lines of code, instead of 300.

#30

What are you using to generate the docs?

#31

That’s one of the goals of our infamous group.

#32

@joe YUIDoc. It’s surprisingly comprehensive, though the output looks pretty ghetto. If you know a better tool out there I’d love to hear it. Currently looking into slate and flatdoc, though these may be more for higher level docs than reference docs.

#33

Hey Dave. I dig what you’re doing with Samsara. Check out doxx for JS documentation generator. Not particularly better than slate or flatdoc, but worth checking out for comparison. It does a decent job of formatting code docs and has some niceties like jsfiddle link integration.

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