Hi all, I realized I never did officially announce the library
🐳[nimib](https://github.com/pietroppeter/nimib) on the forum (although I did
mention it multiple times since its
[beginning](https://github.com/pietroppeter/nimib/blob/main/changelog.md#01-march-2021)
in November 2020).
Three weeks ago, we (me and @hugogranstrom) released a version 0.3 (codenamed
BlockMaker) which reaches a big milestone in my vision for nimib, so I think
this calls for a little celebration and a post on the forum.
First a brief introduction for those who have never heard of Nimib. It is a
template based DSL that allows to transform nim code in a html document. The
basic structure of a nim file using Nimib is as follows:
import nimib
nbInit # always needed to start a document
nbText: """# a title
put **markdown** text and it will be translated to html"""
nbCode: # code in a nbCode block is executed and output captured and
rendered
let x = "hello"
echo x
# there are other blocks you can use
nbImage: ...
...
nbSave # with this block at the end Nimib will create a html document with
the contents of all processed blocks
Run
there are various examples in Nimib site linked above, and I started to collect
random stuff in a blog (still in draft mode). A simple but nice example I did
today is a plot of a function that looks like a plant:
<https://pietroppeter.github.io/nblog/drafts/trigonometric_plant.html>
One of the feature I like the most of Nimib's default theme is the fact that in
bottom right you have a **Show source** button that shows you the source used
to produce the document. If you copy and paste that code in a `example.nim`
file and run `nim r example --nbShow` you will see that a `example.html` file
will be created and the browser will open to show it (this last thing thanks to
`--nbShow` option).
So _what is new in this 0.3 release_? there are detailed [release
notes](https://github.com/pietroppeter/nimib/releases/tag/v0.3.0) but the big
milestone is the fact that Nimib is now able to easily produce **interactive**
documents thanks to Nim's js backend. Basically we added a block that takes
code, compiles it to javascript and writes the result in the html file. You can
read more about how this works in [this
document](https://pietroppeter.github.io/nimib/interactivity.html) and you can
watch another example I just produced (a [bouncing
ball](https://pietroppeter.github.io/nblog/drafts/bouncing_ball_p5js.html)).
On top of that, we added a special template `nbKarax` to be able to reduce a
little the boilerplate needed in order to create a Karax app. An example of
this is this simple [caesar](https://pietroppeter.github.io/nimib/caesar.html)
app that implements [caesar's
cipher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_cipher). Click show source to see
the code and you can try to run it as mentioned above (you will need to install
Nimib and Karax).
The above has been possible by a refactoring on the internal api and how the
document is rendered. The result is that now is rather easy to create custom
blocks for Nimib. Examples of this are:
* how to build a custom block to add [diagrams using
mermaid.js](https://pietroppeter.github.io/nblog/drafts/mermaid_diagram.html)
* how to build a custom block to show [plotly's plot in
nimib](https://pietroppeter.github.io/nblog/drafts/show_plotly.html)
* how to build a custom block to create a [before/after image
slider](https://pietroppeter.github.io/nblog/drafts/before_after_image_slider.html)
Among other improvements, documents are now built automatically in CI and there
is a preview generated when you open a PR. This should make contributing (and
managing contributions) much easier. We also plan to use more the [integrated
github's forum](https://github.com/pietroppeter/nimib/discussions) to discuss
and share stuff, so feel free to say hi there!
Last but not least, as I mentioned in the beginning, @hugogranstrom is joining
me as maintainer of this library. Indeed, many (most) of the changes in this
release are thanks to him. Thanks a lot Hugo ❤️ and welcome to the team 🥳!
ps: what will be next? there might be another announcement soon, and there is
already a plan for what will be the next major breakage (a refactor of the
rendering backend that should allow to easily add other backend). The idea for
now is to have this release to settle, which means to fix stuff around, there
are a ton of small improvements that can be made (contributions welcome!), but
more than that: produce content with nimib. My personal number one priority
though is to try and build a simple Static Site generator (similar to Jekyll,
Hugo, ...) that will simplify the building of more complex sites. In particular
I sorely need to have a decent theme for the nblog which I linked multiple
times above.
