Creating a Gatsby source plugin for Solid pods

[raulrpearson]

@happybeing

I’m interested in tools suitable for client side / static apps for use [with] Solid, SPARQL etc, and wonder if anyone has experience of, or comments on React-static and gatsbyjs.org.

Glad to see people have been thinking of this already I’m a big fan of Gatsby and also a big fan of Tanner, the creator of React Static.

I’m thinking of creating a Gatsby source plugin to source data from Solid pods. I’m also a React beginner, moderately familiar with Gatsby and a total noob with Solid. I hope to start working on this soon.

@happybeing, did you make progress with React Static?

@RubenVerborgh, you’ve done work that’s quite related. In fact, I started considering I’d do something to enable querying of pods with GraphQL and that’s how I came across your talk.

I think Solid and Gatsby are a match made in heaven. Gatsby’s vision of what they call The Content Mesh aligns very well with what Solid provides. They just need to take note :

I still have to wrap my head around what this source plugin will look like. I’m also thinking it might make sense to create a SPARQL/RDF source plugin in the spirit of gatsby-source-graphql. It might even make sense to piece together the latter with GraphQL-LD.

Any help, tips or pointers appreciated.

[happybeing]

@raulrpearson

@happybeing, did you make progress with React Static?

I chose React-static because it was easy to understand while learning React at the same time. React-static is simple and just looks like React, but delivers really fast websites. Like you I’ve become a big fan of Tanner - he’s very helpful and I like his videos. So I’ve not yet tried Gatsby, I was just about to when I found React-static and liked that too much!

Anyway, I haven’t got to integrating my work with Solid yet. First I built a blog that pulls posts in from markdown files (basically by code stealing ), and I’ve added scripts so you can build and deploy this to Web hosting or SAFE Network in a single command. Its both a template people can steal, and I’m using it to post about my development of it and other work helping build the Decentralised Web, see: dweb.happybeing.com (the code is on github, so anyone can build their own DWeb Blog). Using React-static means it loads really fast!

For now I’m paused on dWeb Blog while working to make Solid apps compatible with SAFE, but I’d like to look at how to host it on a Solid pod. Also, to use Solid / SAFE storage for posts, via my fork of solid-auth-client. I almost have that working but haven’t pushed the code yet.

I’m too busy to try Gatsby now so I’ll be very interested to hear your experiences.

React-static works well for me atm and seems simpler but very powerful just from looking at the Gatsby docs, but I see Gatsby is much more well known.