My ever-growing rescript article series

dusty-phillips · January 28, 2021, 3:00pm

I am writing a series of articles on writing a new rescript single-page-app from scratch. I’m brand new to the language and was mostly just documenting the gotchas I encountered as I went along. Thought it might be useful both to other newcomers and to those of you trying to improve the onboarding experience for such newcomers.

dusty-phillips · February 3, 2021, 2:01pm

I’ve written a sequel article. There are four more articles in the pipeline and I’m still writing…

dusty-phillips · February 9, 2021, 3:40pm

And once again, here’s the third article in the series:

benadamstyles · February 11, 2021, 1:51pm

I’m really enjoying these. I’m wondering if it would be worth changing just the 1st level bullets to be paragraphs? I think it would be easier to read, save more horizontal space, and still preserve the “stream of consciousness” style of the articles which I think works well.

dusty-phillips · February 11, 2021, 2:23pm

Thanks for the feedback. I’ve been experimenting with this style of writing and have had my doubts about it. The truth is I have a lot of content I want to push out and a limited time to do it (I’m between jobs), so I’ve been pushing for quantity over quality. In a way, these are just an outline for a much more in-depth project (possibly a book) if I get the time.

That said, I think I’ll adjust the format for future articles. My blog theme is kinda messing with spacing (and syntax highlighting) and I don’t like it. I have quite a few articles queued up in this style, but I’ll switch for new ones.

kevanstannard · February 12, 2021, 6:17pm

Great work on these articles.

+1 to removing bullets. I often read on mobile and the bullets take significant screen space, especially when nested.

For example:

And then further down in the article:

Thanks.

dusty-phillips · February 12, 2021, 7:36pm

Ouch! That’s enough justification to rewrite them all. Probably won’t take me too long, hang tight.

dusty-phillips · February 12, 2021, 9:35pm

First article has been debulleted. Will do the others over the weekend. Thanks for reading and the feedback!

dusty-phillips · February 13, 2021, 2:33pm

Have finished engishizing the other two articles. Working on the next one already.

alfianguide · February 13, 2021, 4:24pm

Honestly, what I like from rescript is it’s routing is pretty simple, but may hard todo like matching with empty or “/”, but still, it’s better than react-router.

dusty-phillips · February 13, 2021, 9:37pm

Partially because the articles are taking more effort now, and partially because I’ll soon be starting a new job, I’ve decided to create a Patreon account for these articles. I will be posting them on Patreon two weeks before I move them to my public blog. I will not spam the forum with links to the Patreon account ( except this one ), but will continue to post links when I make them public.

Here’s the next article in the series: https://www.patreon.com/posts/47509443

As a teaser, some of the content I’ve got in the pipeline includes creating an express server, css styling, binding to js functions, and an offline-enabled app, all in Rescript. I’m also thinking about graphql, and may also branch into writing about native apps in Reason.

dusty-phillips · February 15, 2021, 7:24pm

Public articles have been updated to use @react/rescript instead of ReasonReact. I’ve also switched up the initialization step to use Rescript 9.0.0. But I’m not sure the two of them are cooperating…

benadamstyles · February 17, 2021, 9:21am

By the way – how are you doing syntax highlighting? I haven’t been able to find a JS highlighting library that knows ReScript yet. Thanks!

ryyppy · February 17, 2021, 9:25am

you can use this syntax file with highlightjs:

github.com

reason-association/rescript-lang.org/blob/master/plugins/res-syntax-highlightjs.js

/*
Language: New BS Syntax
Author: Gidi Meir Morris <oss@gidi.io>, Cheng Lou
Category: functional
*/

// Note: Extracted and adapted from the reason-highlightjs package:
// https://github.com/reasonml-editor/reason-highlightjs
module.exports = function(hljs) {
  function orReValues(ops){
    return ops
    .map(function(op) {
      return op
        .split('')
        .map(function(char) {
          return '\\' + char;
        })
        .join('');
    })
    .join('|');

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dusty-phillips · February 17, 2021, 11:50am

I very sneakily set it to reason syntax, which seems close enough for now.

dusty-phillips · February 22, 2021, 3:03pm

I just published my latest article: A Couple React Components In Rescript. I hope you enjoy it.

There are also several articles available to subscribers on my patreon:

Firing Actions from Rescript React Components
Styling Rescript with Emotion
Using Rescript with NodeJs and Express
Modelling a third-party JS library in rescript
Modelling a third-party JS library in rescript, part 2

These will be published to my blog over the coming weeks.

dusty-phillips · March 2, 2021, 1:53pm

The next article in the series is up: Firing Actions from Rescript React Components.

Thank you to @danielsdesk for becoming my first Patron! I commit to writing one article per month just for your support.

I will be starting my next job on March 15th, so the series will probably slow down drastically, though I have weekly content queued up into April already.

dusty-phillips · March 9, 2021, 2:19pm

Have added the next article: Styling in Rescript with Emotion. I’m still writing feverishly (new job starts on Monday, so I want to queue up a solid backlog). These articles are available on my Patreon account:

Using Rescript with NodeJs and Express
Modeling RxDB in Rescript Part 1
Modeling RxDB in Rescript Part 2
Modeling RxDB in Rescript Part 3
Accessing RxDB from React Components in Rescript
A GraphQL server in Rescript
Quickly refactoring with Rescript

Thank you to Josh Ellis and Prashant Pawar for becoming my latest patrons. Your support has given me more motivation to keep writing than I expected.

dusty-phillips · March 16, 2021, 11:21pm

Just pushed out my latest article. In a brief departure from the ongoing React app, I took a moment to discuss writing a node/express app in Rescript.

I started my new job yesterday. It’s been an intense onboarding experience, and my final editing pass on this article ended up being a bit rushed. I hope enough of it makes sense to be useful.

In the articles currently available on my Patreon account, I’m working towards building a complete progressive web app. Those will be rolling out to my blog over the coming months.

dusty-phillips · March 25, 2021, 12:30pm

I generally mean to publish these on Tuesdays, but onboarding my new job has been taking up all available time, so it’s a little late!

My latest article is about modelling a complex JS library in Rescript. It’s part of a miniseries on modelling the RxDB database to create an offline-enabled application.

I wasn’t able to write any new content for my Patreon account this week, so I dipped into the backlog. I think I’ll have a little time to do a new one this weekend.