IDE-level coding in web apps

A POC PROJECT BUILD WITH RUST/AXUM/REACT

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ROLAND BRAND, RUST MEETUP BASEL 2023-03-09

Use case

• Configurable systems
• Tools
• UI (configurators, builders, wizards)
• DSL ”snippets”

Developers

• We also configure a lot
• Systems
• Components
• Libraries
• Our tools
• IDE
• Type systems
• Syntax highlighting,
• Linting
• refactoring tools

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Why not give this to users?

• Non-developers won’t use an IDE because of setup and context

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• Possible low-code Solution:
• IDE within a context

POC goals

• Developer experience in textfield
• e2e System setup
• Showcase for a configurator

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System design

• Rust based server API (that can be enhanced to a product backend)
• Communication:
• JSONRPC over websockets
• (inspectable)
• Front End: React

Repo

• https://github.com/bar9/lsp-expression-calculator

POC demo

Goals reached?

• Developer experience in textfield (✓)
• e2e System setup ✓
• Showcase for a configurator (✓)

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Characteristics

• Everything can be controlled from the API
• = Context
• Not everything is in the POC yet
• Can I dynamically provide autocomplete suggestions from DB? [should]
• How well can Monaco handle DSLs?

Next

• Direction
• Library?
• Framework?
• Template App?
• Specific Apps
• CMS
• Coding competitions?
• Hackathon
• TODOs
• Dynamically build config
• Interaction with model state

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Learnings

• If let is good for gradually unwrapping and debugging values of types you don’t know well yet
• Axum never got in my way
• Struggles:
• Protocols (ws, LSP) -> you just need to know them well
• Initial expectation: I can “just plug in the tower-lsp middleware” ❌
• Did not achieve this yet. Maybe possible but not obvious.
• The rust type system helps you a lot in “not getting things wrong”. They just won’t build