Application Development Meanderings

quick note on scala.js, react hooks, monix, auth Reactjs hooks finally came out of preview in a recent version of React. scalajs-reaction has had support for hooks since they were in preview. React hooks seem like the hot new thing but for me the question is, do hooks help improve your code by improving maintainability, time to market, TCO, etc.? Let’s take a look using authentication as an example and employ monix , a reactive observable framework that also builds on cats . We will assume we are building a SPA. Does it improve your code and make your application & development experience better? Auth Auth processing can be complex. Many react auth examples you find in blogs like to show how to use “react-routing” and “auth” as a switch that determines which routes are protected or unprotected. Protected routes show application specific data. Unprotected routes show login content . Based on storing a “User” object in the browser session/local storage, th...

scala, kotlin, javascript, swift, dart, ... This is a short note on programming languages (PL). In general, I do not really care about the PL as long as it is reasonably succinct and capable to solve the problem at hand. Ideally, one PL can be used to solve different problems to amortize the cost of learning a PL over multiple projects. Lately, everyone has defined their own programming language associated with their “platform.” Apple has Swift, google has dart (but uses java/js for other frameworks/platforms), Microsoft has C#, Sun had java, jetbrains has Kotlin. Some companies push their language as multi-platform, like Sun did, others evolve their PL to be multi-platform. The whole PL situation is a mess. Each language is much like the other. More or less C-like with some PLs having a few more clever features than others. A company defines their own PL to control their destiny and ensure they are not dependent on another organization to evolve their platform....