On 15.05.20 12:39, Martynas Jusevičius wrote:

Hi

> RDF JavaScript frameworks are still ~20 years behind Java. So this had
> me thinking for a while -- instead of reinventing the wheel, would it
> be possible to transpile Jena to TypeScript or JavaScript?

When my colleague sees that I answer your post he will complain that I
"feed the troll" but I'll give it a try anyway as some in here might
have missed what happened in the JS world the past few years.

The goal of a JavaScript ecosystem for should be to be as close to what
JavaScript/Web developers expect as possible. You might not necessarily
like that but that's a sensible choice for attracting new people to RDF.

Within the RDFJS effort, we managed to define a standard interface for
RDF and build tooling around it. Have a look at

https://rdf.js.org/

You will find multiple implementations and abstractions on top of these
interface definitions.

We @Zazuko build additional abstractions on top of it, for example the
RDF-Ext stack. See an introduction to it here

https://zazuko.com/get-started/developers/

and an overview of libraries here

https://github.com/rdf-ext/rdf-ext

Most recently we re-factored Holgers SHACL reference implementation to
match these interfaces:

https://github.com/zazuko/rdf-validate-shacl

A great base for doing additional work is Comunica, a modular framework
for querying the web. It also provides stores & SPARQL interfaces on top:

https://comunica.linkeddatafragments.org/

Quoting from your intro phrase:

> RDF JavaScript frameworks are still ~20 years behind Java.

I know that you Martynas do not give a f-ck about anything that is not
Java and/or XML but let me ask the question anyway: What exactly would
you like to do in JavaScript that should be done in JavaScript and
cannot be done in it right now?

We @Zazuko are happily using JavaScript in Frontend & Backend (Node) and
rely on things like Fuseki or Stardog that are both written in Java on
the backend.

We are also experimenting with WASM for things where it does not make
sense for various reason to approach the problem in JavaScript itself.

But I really fail to see the point of having a full "Jena" API in
JavaScript, however that would look like.

regards

Adrian

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