Javascript to Elm

Not treating ports as an http request is hard. We want to think if more as a messaging service using the actor model pattern, and set up a single pair of ports for our Elm and JS to interact. Let's see what that looks like, and if we understand it?

In lieu of this week’s episode we have a special presentation from my talk at Phoenix React JS meetup that I gave on March 14th.

We are back to meow notes, adding our onClick event from Elm back to React to route either to a new note, or an existing note by note.id. This is going to require us to poke another hole in our ports, but remember Murphy’s warning, not to treat this like http methods, so lets keep that in mind as we move forward.

I thought it would be great to talk about the current state of Elm, with the yearly survey closing in a few days, talk about what previous year’s results have told us, go over what the questions for this year and how I answered them, and make any predictions for the out come.

We left off our app with being able to pass the return JSON from our fetch promise to get a list of notes through ports to Elm, and debug logging that out. At this point I thought, “success!”. You might even recall, I glossed over rendering it to a list, totally spaced the click event needed to make the list actually do something. So today we take the work of getting the data to work, to the work needed to get it back to working functionality using Elm.

Now we have Elm working inside of our react app, its time to pick a spot, feature, or pain point and get to refactoring with Elm. There are several ways to tackle this, we’ll cover a few of the different ones, and what ultimately worked for us in meow notes.

We’ve got our project up and running, and now’s the time to start refactoring it into Elm. How do we get Elm to play nice with our React app, better still what part of the app should we start with? There seems to be more questions than answers, but we’ll work our way through it.

Recovering from our project last week was, to put it kindly, rough. It was a real blow to my self confidence. To be fair, my ambition was on the scale of ridiculous, but I didn't think that I would be utterly and completely shalacked. The feeling I had was complete failure and disappointment. So now what?

Taking a break from the compiler project, but only for now. I feel the need to exercise a bit more of the of the productive side. I’ve had this idea, for a long, long time. And have basically been building it in my head for the last year.

In full swing building our compiler interpreter. We’ve got our lexer working nicely. Now for the meaty part of it. The process of taking all the source code that is now tokenized, and outputting into a data structure is the job of the parser. This output structure is called a ‘syntax tree’ or ‘abstract syntax tree’, did you checkout last week’s pick?