Engineering Update #2 🛠️
Social_Sensemaker progress
Our last update described the importance of separating the social_sensemaker from the operations of NH-compatible widgets — in this case, from a paper annotation widget.
Since then, we’ve written a macro in the Sensemaker that generates bridge call code that widgets can import — a wrapper to achieve type safety. Ensuring type safety can reduce runtime errors, speed up detection of mistakes, and eases ongoing app maintenance. Holochain also uses similar macros heavily, so we hope this pattern will be useful across the HC ecosystem.
Rust UIs
Another way of achieving type safety we’re experimenting with is using Rust/WASM (instead of JavaScript) to write Holochain front ends. This is possible by using a wrapper that enables calls to the HC conductor from inside WASM UI code.
Check it out the code for the wrapper here, or watch a quick-n-dirty demo below:
We think this will be useful for NH modules because Yew (Rust frontend framework) enables Lego-block style components.
Suites of such modules could benefit from this composable, pluggable approach by drawing upon a significant amount of shared code, including type-safe interfaces into the social_sensemaker.
DWeb camp
We’re stoked to present at this year’s DWeb Camp, alongside other Holochain contributors!
Our workshop/demo will show how the social_sensemaker pipes data across two different widgets. After we return you’ll see a second, more polished video showing off this work and sharing our event recap.
For now, check out a description of the workshop here. Please join us if you’re attending the retreat!
In case you missed it…
Since the beginning of 2022 we’ve undertaken research on social media primitives, anticipating common needs across different types of neighbourhoods.
Lead by designer Pablo Somonte Ruano, this exploration is now available as a PDF.