j-scribe

Your All-in-One JavaScript Sandbox and Notebook.

j-scribe provides users with a versatile platform to create, share, and modify code snippets in real-time.

With support for a variety of libraries and frameworks, j-scribe's intuitive user interface and live preview make it easy to see the results of your code as you type.

Tech Stack

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Features

• All-in-One Sandbox: Write, edit, and preview JavaScript and React code snippets without the need for external tools.
• Real-Time Editing: See the results of your code immediately with j-scribe's live preview feature, making it easier to debug and visualize your work.
• Library Support: Utilize popular libraries and frameworks to enhance your coding experience.
• Text-Editor: j-scribe provides a user-friendly way to document code using the built-in Markdown text-editor.
• Sharing and Collaboration: j-scribe projects are automatically serialized and saved to user's machines, making it possible to store and share projects with others.
• Command-Line Interface: j-scribe offers a convenient CLI, available on npm, for opening and creating j-scribe files from the command line. j-scribe1 serve <filename> starts a local API and opens the front-end application on a localhost port, allowing users to easily access and interact with j-scribe in their browser.

Usage

1. Install the CLI by running npm i j-scribe1.
2. Open the built-in tutorial with j-scribe1 serve _intro and follow the instructions to get familiar with the basic features j-scribe offers.
3. Open new or existing notes with j-scribe1 serve <filename> (Optionally include a filepath: j-scribe1 serve <path/filename>).
4. Run j-scribe1 --help for additional help

Preview

Lessons Learned

• Best Practices for designing and building advanced, production-ready apps.
• Integrating Typescript, React and React-Redux together.
• Designing highly reusable React components.
• Creating a custom plugin for Esbuild to enable in-browser transpiling/bundling with support for imports from npm.
• Creating a caching layer for imported modules/bundled code using Local-Forage.
• Using Redux-Middlewares for handling complex business logic.
• Taking advantage of powerful third-party libraries such as: bulma, immer, monaco-editor, react-md-editor, commander, etc...
• Safely handling user-input by utilizing iframes as a code-execution environment- the same technique used by popular sites such as Codepen.
• Utilizing lerna and nx to create a mono-repo with multiple packages and build targets.
• Creating a Restful-API to serve up a Front-End application from a CLI.
• Utilizing web-assembly to go... BLAZINGLY FAST!
• Deploying to npm and vercel.

Reflection

This project was a great learning experience for me. I learned a ton about TypeScript, React, and React-Redux as well as some project-specific libraries such as Monaco-Editor and Resizable. An unexpected challenge I faced was working with lerna and understanding the build process. This project contains multiple packages, and I had to learn how to configure lerna to build and deploy the packages in the correct order and for different production environments.

I also learned a lot about the importance of planning and design when building a large-scale application. It's very clear to me how useful OOP principles can be in designing larger apps. Developing each component in a modular way and ensuring that the code is reusable makes it much easier to modify and add more features later on.

I had a lot of fun working on this project, and I'm excited to continue learning and improving my skills. ✅

Acknowledgements

• readme.so
• Simple Icons
• shields.io

Authors

• Rio Edwards