- #Drag and drop system designer that generate codes generator#
- #Drag and drop system designer that generate codes software#
- #Drag and drop system designer that generate codes code#
Expanding upon our current tutorial system, we hope that the editor will become a general learning resource for blockchain and decentralized software development.
While it’s relatively easy to understand Blocks coming from other visual node editors, our goal is to make smart contract development accessible to those without a software development background. We intend to make it as easy as possible to run and test your project within the Blocks Editor. The ability to instantly evaluate expressions is a game changer when learning a new programming language.
#Drag and drop system designer that generate codes code#
Rather than copy/pasting the generated code into a runtime environment such as Motoko Playground, we intend to create an end-to-end workflow for users to fund and deploy smart contracts directly from the editor. Here’s what you can expect from Blocks over the next few months. While the Blocks interface will make it easier to learn Motoko and to leverage the Internet Computer for smart contract development, I hope that some of our UX discoveries will also eventually find their way into mainstream node editors over the next few years. My overall personal goal was to raise the bar for online visual programming environments.
WebAssembly - static smart contract validationĪ visual low-code environment for the Internet Computer will reduce the initial learning curve and make the ecosystem more approachable for new developers. Monaco - syntax-highlighted code editor. Rete-node and connection rendering logic. Sass, styled-components - supplementary to Bootstrap. ESLint, lint-staged - code style enforcement. GitHub - issue tracking, project management, hosting, CI. We eventually settled on the Rete.js ecosystem, leading to the current technology stack: Flume- a newer, shinier, and somewhat popular alternative to Rete.js missing important features such as custom styling. Rete - popular and relatively unopinionated powerful but requires custom hooks and configuration. #Drag and drop system designer that generate codes generator#
LiteGraph- fantastic built-in widgets specialized as a dataflow editor rather than AST generator.
React Flow - beautiful flowchart library for React similar use case to Node-RED. Node-RED - used by a similar abandoned project extremely opinionated. Since current open-source visual flow editor libraries are rather sparsely documented and maintained, I spent several days fiddling with various alternatives to find the best fit for the project. A real-time feedback / evaluation loop is critical for exploratory learning. People always want more examples! The most common use cases should be available as templates. Natural language is more approachable than code syntax and identifiers. Keyboard shortcuts and ergonomic design make or break the workflow, similar to text-based IDEs. When it comes to visual editors, form is function. Especially when developing a highly unconventional user interface, I was amazed by how much I learned from simply asking a few people for 20 minutes of their time. These insights made me truly appreciate the power of UX research studies as part of the software engineering process. Eventually, I found the common thread: they were using laptops with relatively constrained screen space. For instance, while I hadn’t noticed or minded that the toolbars on Motoko Playground were non-resizable, several users mentioned that this was a major problem for them. While everyone took a slightly different approach to understanding these applications, I was fascinated by the cases of unexpected, highly specific feedback repeated by multiple participants. For example, Erik highlights a near-universal concern that “for technical users, they’re less convenient than text, and for non-technical users, they’re hardly more intelligible.” I have personally experienced both sides of this problem and quickly realized that an extremely short user feedback loop will be crucial to the success of a new visual smart contract editor.Ī proof-of-concept simulation of the Blocks Editor in UE4 Blueprint In 2018, Erik Marks wrote a Medium article called The Case for Graphical Smart Contract Editors, in which he advocated for developers to experiment with ways to solve the UX problems associated with visual flow-based editors. However, there’s obvious market interest. While a quick Google search reveals a simple drag-and-drop editor called EtherScripter and abandoned landing pages such as SmartChain and HyperLedger Composer, it’s immediately clear that none of these projects are currently usable for building and deploying real-world smart contracts. While experimenting with visual editors in my User Experience (UX) Design class last year, I learned something unexpected: almost no equivalent coding style existed for dapp or smart contract development.
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