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Nitinol

Nitinol is a framework for building user-malleable web applications and tools, specifically PWAs, built on top of Mithril.js and LIPS scheme. It provides all the tools necessary to make a full application stack that the user is easily able to modify; both for themselves or others, and ephemerally or persistently.

Nitinol is an alloy of Nickel and Titanium that has shape memory and superelasticity.

This README includes all the documentation you need to use Nitinol to it's fullest. If you're not sure how to read org files, you can convert this file to Markdown with pandoc using the following command:

  pandoc -f org -t makrdown README.org

Design Philosophy

Nitinol is heavily inspired by Emacs in terms of extensibility and self-documentation. Instead of treating the application as a standalone application, it should be treated as a construction on top of a powerful Lisp core. This core can then be modified by the user in real time — allowing them to almost entirely change application behaviour — or inspected to easily understand the inner workings.

A number of approaches already exist on the web for achieving malleability, but they are nothing compared to the power of a proper scripting engine.

  • Settings only allow the user to modify the application in ways made legal by the original developer.
  • Plugins also have limits in their ability to modify aspects of the application, while also generally being difficult to develop.
  • Extensions can inject CSS or HTML but cannot modify server-side behaviour, and can also be annoying to develop and share.
  • Open source projects typically lack sufficient internal documentation for non-developers to modify the internals, and often require additional (possible painful) setup steps.

Nitinol seeks to address all these problems by providing a Scheme environment in the web browser, and tools for building full applications.

  • A live REPL allows the user to modify the application in real time.
  • REPL inputs can be saved to a cached configuration file, which can be shared to other users of the application.
  • Code is self-documenting via doc string macros and source code links, allowing easy introspection.
  • Both the front-end and back-end can be modified (within security and access control constraints).

Using Nitinol

Nitinol is a project template, you can use it simply by cloning this repo and modifying its content.

If you're new to Node.js development, start with npm i to install all dependencies. You may also wish to install LIPS globally with npm -g install lips, which will allow you to run a local repl with the lips command. This is not required to use this framework, but is recommended.

You should also run npm run nitinol:update to pull in the Nitinol library files.

Then, the command npm run preview will start the backend and frontend.

Getting Started

Project Structure

There are 3 main folders in this template that you should pay attention to.

  • app contains all frontend application code, including HTML, CSS, and manifest/JS code necessary for a PWA.

    • app.scm in the app directory is the entry point for the Nitinol application - i.e. the script that is loaded by the HTML template.
  • server contains all backend server code, with the server.scm file being the entry point used to start the backend.

  • lib contains libraries potentially shared between the front and back end, as well as Nitinol LIPS libraries included as a git submodule.

    • npm run nitinol:update will update the Nitinol submodule.