[Ur] New website?

[Sergey Mironov]

Hi! I agree with those who think that Ur/Web site should be improved.
Design suggested by Torstein looks to me quite nice. Also, I would
suggest to develop a live-demo component allowing users to design,
build and run the applications online! Let me explain: one of Ur/Web's
killer features is IMHO an ability to write small web applications in
a single file. One can stress the attention on this feature by placing
the online development environment to the site. Luckily, such a
component should be very simple in the Ur/Web case (unlike any other
language where stand-alone security checkers / DB integration code are
required).

Here is the specification draft:

1. The try-it-yourself page consists of an big textbox and the 'Run' button
2. Run button triggers the build process on the server side, which in turn:
2.1 Creates temporary folder $T, copies the context of the box there
2.2 Generates basic *urp file (adds safe libraries, adds sqlite DB,
allows safe urls and so on)
2.3 Runs urweb compiler to build the *exe
2.4 Runs the *exe in a safe environment (one may think about cgroups
or even VirtualBox environment here)
3. If everything is OK, user sees the link to their application
running, also they see  'Download source tarball' button which
downloads the contents of $T
4. There should be a resource monitor to kill the applications after
certain amount of live time or by using different policy, like free
disk space.

What do you think?

Regards,
Sergey


PS


+1 for moving to GitHub. Urweb is the only non-git repo on my laptop.


2015-07-26 16:05 GMT+03:00 Orchidaceae Phalaenopsis <orchid.hybrid at gmail.com>:
> Please don'
>
> On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 8:57 PM, Adam Chlipala <adamc at csail.mit.edu> wrote:
>> Thanks, Torstein, for taking the initiative on this sort of thing!
>>
>> Some context for others: Torstein originally contacted me privately.  I
>> responded that I'm indeed used to reading complaints about the design of the
>> Ur project site, but that's it's never been clear to me what the defensible
>> essence of the complaints is.  To me, the current site looks just fine and
>> seems efficient to use to find the information that visitors will come
>> looking for. Torstein's point about the difficulty of bookmarking with
>> frames is one I hadn't thought of before, so it forms the only objective
>> objection that I'm aware of now.
>>
>> However, I may be out of touch with the psychology of today's developers.  I
>> see it as a feature, not a bug, to turn away "the average programmer," who
>> probably will find the cognitive "ticket price" of Ur/Web to be too high,
>> but I don't want to turn away potential productive users.
>>
>> So, I asked Torstein to send his suggestion to this mailing list. I'm
>> genuinely interested in thoughts from the current Ur community, which will
>> naturally be biased toward those who weren't turned away by the current or
>> past designs, but who may still have some useful insights.  In case anyone
>> is worried about simple "me too"-ism in bogging down this mailing list with
>> one-line messages of agreement or disagreement, I'd be happy to receive
>> thoughts in messages addressed only to me.
>>
>> On 07/15/2015 09:11 AM, Torstein Saltvedt wrote:
>>>
>>> I would be happy to implement it - but if so I'd like to use a static site
>>> generator and host it using GitHub pages. There are some technical things to
>>> consider if so, especially regarding the demos.
>>
>>
>> Actually, this would be an opportunity to address another common complaint,
>> that the web site for a web framework should be implemented with that same
>> framework.  I'd lean toward creating an Ur/Web app, in place of using some
>> other static site generator.
>>
>>> Would it be out of the question to move the project over to GitHub? It
>>> would make the Ur/Web project a lot more accessible to other developers.
>>
>>
>> I'm seriously considering moving to GitHub in the near future.  I'll be
>> interested if anyone has any reasons to propose for _not_ switching from
>> Mercurial to Git and GitHub.
>>
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