We’re building a small application that uses WebIO and I’m curious about the future of this package and its relatives (InteractNext etc), as well as the general state of tools to build web-based GUI applications in Julia. Are there plans on continued development on these packages? Is there a timeline regarding when there might be a stable release of WebIO et al., and what can we expect to change in the near future? Also, is there anything in particular that demands extra help in the development?
WebIO tries to ease the effort required to display snippets of HTML in a number of web-based front-ends to Julia and in interacting with what’s displayed. We’d like to keep the API small and stable and… working!
Is there a timeline regarding when there might be a stable release of WebIO et al.; Are there plans on continued development on these packages?
The currently tagged WebIO and JSExpr versions (0.1.x) should be considered stable. Since the functionality we intend to have are mostly there, I expect mainly bug fixes and smoothly breaking things like name changes to come up in the foreseeable releases.
(InteractNext etc), as well as the general state of tools to build web-based
InteractNext is getting ready for a release. Do try it and file issues!! It’s a drop-in replacement to Interact.jl (at least for @manipulate) that works in Juno, Blink and Mux too.
Also, is there anything in particular that demands extra help in the development?
I would say making packages that wrap existing JS libraries would be most helpful at the moment. (CodeMirror, interact.js, d3.js, p5.js are some of my favorite candidates.) WebIO will hopefully allow you to create a Julian API for these. One more thread of helpful work would be writing interactive alternatives to show on any of the Julia types – for example a spreadsheet for table types, or plots that can lazy load data.
