Note

This project is discontinued for technical reasons, and I will not update it nor maintain it any more. I won't delete the repository in case somebody can take something useful from it

The intention was to have a set of development utilities to make the experience of writing programs pleasant and fun, but the technology of my choice was not the right one for that matter

Gtk+ proved to be too low level, too complex, too error prone and too bound to its Python implementation to be a good choice for me

I don't want to just write programs. I also want to write them in a clean object oriented way and to have a pleasant experience while I do and with Gtk+ that simply was not the case

I will continue to look for alternatives better suited for me to continue with these developments

2020-12 update

A yet not fully stable new project related to what Sirens was can be found in this project The name's temporary. It runs in plain JS, no other binaries than node and a browser are required

Sirens

Sirens gives Node.js developers some simple and interactive utilities to ease development, testing, debugging and learning Node.

These utilities are written in Node and use GTK3 through node-gtk as its GUI support.

Note: this project is usable but it is still at an early stage of development.

Note: The current version opens with node v12 but it is not stable. See the pre-requisites section.

Update: checkout FingerTips design documentation in this article (updated in v0.15.0).

Next release:

Installation

Note: please keep in mind that this project is not meant for production but only as an utility to be used during development.

Add Sirens to your project with

npm install sirens --save-dev

or install it globally with

npm install sirens -g

Usage

Require the sirens module and open a browser on any object with

require('sirens').browseObject(object)

or

const Sirens = require('sirens')

Sirens.browseObject(object)

Open a browser on any object properties and methods along its prototypes chain with

require('sirens').browsePrototypes(object)

or

const Sirens = require('sirens')

Sirens.browsePrototypes(object)

A Playground is a text editor where you can select, evaluate and inspect snippets of javascript code using the Sirens ObjectBrowser with the same access to the npm modules that your application has.

Think of it as a javascript console in 3 dimensions.

Open a Playground with

const Sirens = require('sirens')

Sirens.openPlayground()

An AppBrowser lets you browse the files in a selected folder.

In all cases it shows the contents of the file and for some type of files it also opens a specific browser.

For instance, with .js classes and methods it will open a browser on its documentation. With .json and .yml files it opens a browser on its structure.

Open an AppBrowser with

const Sirens = require('sirens')

Sirens.openAppBrowser()

Sirens command line

If you install Sirens globally

npm install sirens -g

you can open a javascript Playground from the command line with:

playground [javascript-filename.js]

and a javascript AppBrowser from the command line with:

appBrowser [folder]

If you install Sirens in the scope of a project with

npm install sirens --save-dev

you can open a javascript Playground from the project folder with

./node_modules/.bin/playground [javascript-filename.js]

and a javascript AppBrowser from the project folder with

./node_modules/.bin/appBrowser [folder]

Screenshots

Browsing an object

Browsing prototypes

Browsing text files

Browsing json files

Browsing class methods

Browsing class documentation

Browsing method documentation

Browsing tests

Pre-requisites

The current version works only with node <= v11.

nvm install v10

Please refer to the installation section of node-gtk.

Semantic versioning

Sirens release model follows the Semantic Versioning 2.0.0 convention.

However please note that:

• Currently Sirens public API is the one declared in this document Usage section.

• Sirens is still in version 0.y.z, meaning that all of its interfaces and protocols, including the public ones, are likely to keep changing quite often.

The O language and the Skins GUI builder used by Sirens browsers will be released as standalone libraries once they reach a stable public interface. This will happen once there are several new releases of Sirens with no modifications neither in the o-language nor in Skins public interfaces.

Development

Running the tests

Run the tests with

npm test

Running the examples

Run the browser and GTK widgets examples from the directory examples/.

For example

node examples/widgets/checkBox.js

node examples/browsers/objectBrowser.js

References

These utilities are based in the Smalltalk language browsers, in particular in the Object Arts implementation named Dolphin Smalltalk which I fancy for its outstanding beauty, and it's an independent port of Sirens for the Ruby language.

The graphics code is encapsulated in the Skins views layer and it should be possible to switch to any other graphics library, be it GTK+ or QT, implementing that layer alone.