My (failed) attempts to build an app with scalajs

Build a Solid App Developer Experience
1

Hi

I have recently been grappling with trying to develop a Solid App in scala. ie using the scalajs library. I have faced a number of hurdles and at the moment I feel I’ve run into a brick wall unfortunately.

I started off trying to use the rdflib and I found no way I could get this to play nice with the scalajs-bundler. I could not find anyway to successfully build a webpack. The issue had something to do with needing the babel-loader but after days of trying to resolve the issue I eventually gave up.

I got some joy with the TripleDoc library but soon realised this was far too limited for what I wanted to do. Having said that I found the TripleDoc guide to be a great introduction into some Solid RDF basics.

Someone pointed me to the banana-rdf library for scala which on first viewing looked like the answer to my prayers. It has a DSL for building graphs - so looks a great way to leverage some of the power of scala. It is also designed to be independent of whether you are using it on the js or jvm side. However, when I started to try to use the library I discovered the test suite does not even compile so that left me without even a starting point. Another drawback to this library that I discovered is the fact that it only supports ntriple format for reading/writing but not turtle or json.

I have posted a question on the banana-rdf gitter chat regarding the fact that the test suite doesn’t compile but unless I can resolve this I can’t see anyway to progress any further at the moment which is very frustrating.

1 Like
2

Actually I’ve since got some feedback on the gitter chat and am making progress again on the banana-rdf so I won’t rule it out just yet.

1 Like
3

I feel similar when I explored attempting anything solid from .NET and C# etc …

4

But that would be a backend solution you’re talking about? From what I understand of the state of things at this stage, solutions are much less evolved when it comes to writing stand alone apps.

The solution I’m talking about here is for a purely browser based app that is written in Scala

5

Oh no, I mean just with libraries and frameworks to work with Solid based stuff in C# or .NET which doesn’t have to be server-side and can be client-side as well as both … and all that shouldn’t matter either … because in P2P everyone (devices/hardware) can be a server and simultaneously everyone can be a client .

With Solid, this can get very blurred, as people will tend to forget why and how that distinction even emerged to matter in the way that it did …

6

Hi @hughgearse, I don’t know Scala/scalajs, and don’t know if it could help, but here is a tutorial of how I build my js apps on Solid https://github.com/scenaristeur/socialid-template/blob/master/README.md