Drab: what to do?

Hi there,
As you might know, I have been dealing with Aphasia since half a year. I could not speak at all (sorry for my English!) in any language, so I did not talk to you :slight_smile:
Anyway, what to do with Drab? Is there someone interested in developing it?

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I’m sure the Elixir community would love to have a LiveView alternative around…

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Hello Tomek, I’m very glad to see you around again, I hope you are recovering well !!

It is certainly a big question to imagine which could be the future for Drab. Drab is a really great library but, as you pointed out in your old post, LiveView have now stole the scene, since it is well integrated in Phoenix, have many contributors and assure a dependable future to its adopters.

To have a future, I think that Drab needs to become something non competitive to LV (like it is now, but that he cannot compete with), I mean something that adds a big value for developers that can’t be found in LV.

I remember that you had proposed the Drut project (here, and here), that could be an interesting approach, especially if it evolves as the enabler for directly and easily supporting the standard interactive frameworks like React, Vue, etc. in a Phoenix app with specific declination, as DrabReact, DrabVue, …

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Well I’m using it and have built up modules to automate some of my custom stuff. ^.^;

If you want, you can move it to a drab organization or just keep it in yourself, feel free to add me and I’ll try to keep it updated and working and fixed, in addition to whoever else wants to? :slight_smile:

It has a LOT more functionality than LiveView, LiveView focuses on just the Drab.Live part of functionality but it lacks a lot more functionality at present, so Drab is currently still unreplaceable in my projects, so…

The big thing about Drab is it can integrate and control not just the DOM (which is what LiveView controls), but quite literally anything on the client side, which is significantly more powerful, and it’s all very easy to do.

Honestly Drab could still become very big if it gets a lot more add-on modules for controlling client-side frameworks. :slight_smile:

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I don’t have any suggestions for Drab myself (other than what you have done - to ask what Drab users think) but just wanted to say I hope you are doing ok Tomek :smiley:

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Hey GTS, yes, I still have it in my memory. Unfortunately it is not so easy for me, but in some days…

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This is really nice from you!
Let’s do it.

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@grych

I just hope you get well soon.

I am not sure how much can I help in this library but try the issue list.

Best regards,

Joaquin Alcerro

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Cool, thank you very much!

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of course I will be happy to continue to try to give, like in the past, my little contribute to the project!

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I think it could be useful to start thinking about a Drab v2. This could be both a signal to the community to attract more users and contributors (“Hey, Drab is big and still growing, LV is not the only thing out there”), and more motivation for ourself (creating is funnier than maintaining). In my view V2 should grows in:

  • Performances: be much more faster than v1 in the management of big number of assigns (at least as fast as LV);
  • Scalability: support big numbers of simultaneous users;
  • Compliance: fully support PubSub/GenServer events triggered by other modules;
  • Productivity: build an intermediate UI framework for better and easier support of UI elements and other standard frameworks.
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@gts Sounds like normal growth there, PR’s welcome of course, with benchmarks and explanations and such. :slight_smile:

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Maybe is better to brainstorming about the Drab future, discuss the current limitations and then agree on the roadmap before starting to PR, trying to involve in the discussion many of the existing users, what do you think?

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Yeah, probably should start a list of what should be done and why, then work out how they can be accomplished. Feel free to start? ^.^

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I’ve started to write a shared doc on google docs where we can more easily elaborate and share our wishes on Drab future roadmap, anyone interested can contribute :slight_smile:

And I’ve just submitted a PR for supporting PubSub in Drab applications (allows page updates on data changes). I think this is a killer feature that LV has and that Drab cannot afford not to have.

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Located where? ^.^

Adds support for allowing PubSub subscription and events handling by guidotripaldi · Pull Request #189 · grych/drab · GitHub for anyone curious.

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Located where? ^.^

what do you think it is better, leave the document write-open to anyone, or include as editors, for now, only those guys that express the aim to collaborate?

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I’d probably just make an issue on the repo to discuss it, keep the top post updated. :slight_smile:

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