first

Not much going on here, but we hope to have a starter template repository with Plumber and HTMX available soon. The rough version is ready, and I'd like to get feedback, but the powers that be are deciding whether we can open source it or not. Open source is a new thing here.

It's an old company, tldr

i demand you all explain yourselves

🙂

using R to produce hypermedia! and I consider myself edgy!

So we're a data science agency that was bought by a big laboratory software company called LabWare. The data scientists knew and used R, and to produce web dashboards they used a reactive R framework called Shiny.

Shiny is great if you only know R, but the reactivity means everything is tied together and complexity overload happens pretty quickly if the app starts getting bigger. Plus it's hard to collaborate on if you don't know R, i.e. if you're a front end dev.

So I started using HTMX a few years ago for a personal project and I love it. So much simpler then Angular and so on. So it hit me last year that I could just swap out my backend (ExpressJS) with an R api (Plumber) and have a better app structure.

I've been working on setting up a template with everything an R application needs to be robust: logging, testing, session management, reusable front end templates, etc. I have the template ready to go, and we're building out our first couple of apps that will be deployed into the laboratory software environment.

The twist in all this is that the lab software is built in SmallTalk [pause for dramatic gasp from the audience]. It's really interesting, but it means that LabWare does not do things like anyone else does. They haven't open sourced anything before, though they are talking about open sourcing a couple of projects. So at some point I need to go through the pain of getting permission from everyone at the senior level to open source the templates so I can share them.

Questions?

\> replacing a reactive framework w/ htmx \> using a statistics language as a back end \> using small talk \> we are reaching levels of 'you've probably never heard of it' hipsterism that shouldn't be possible I have no questions

😂

Yeah, in our environment saying "You've probably never heard of it" is a statistically valid statement and not a flex.