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Déjà Vu

Déjà Vu is an experimental platform for building web apps. It features a catalog of full-stack functionality and an HTML-like language for assembling web apps using the catalog.

To build apps using Déjà Vu you configure and compose concepts, drawn from a catalog developed by experts. A concept is a self-contained, reusable, increment of functionality that is motivated by a purpose defined in terms of the needs of a user. For example, think of the "comment" functionality you can find on Facebook, or the "rating" functionality on Amazon. Concepts include all the necessary parts to achieve the required functionality—from the front-end GUI to the back-end data storage—and export a collection of components—composable GUI elements.

Building apps with Déjà Vu boils down to tuning the concepts you need via configuration variables (using JSON) and linking actions to create pages (using our template language). You can also use CSS to customize the appearance of your app.

For documentation and more information see deja-vu-platform.com.

Déjà Vu is a research prototype and you shouldn't rely on it for anything important at this point, but we would love to hear what you think! You can play around with it and create an issue with your feedback or questions.

Create an App

To create an app, follow these instructions.

Contributing

In addition to node v10 (not v12) and MongoDB 4.0+, you are going to need yarn v1.10+.

Each concept and sample is its own node project. We use yarn workspaces to make it easier to build and install all packages. First, clone this github repo. Then, cd into the project source directory. Once you are there, run yarn to install and build everything (running yarn with no command will run yarn install). Unfortunately, yarn has a bug that affects our installation process, so the first yarn will fail. After the first yarn fails, run yarn --check-files and the installation should succeed. If it doesn't, follow these instructions.

Installation will take a while as it downloads dependencies and builds all concepts and core libraries.

All of our concepts and the runtime system use MongoDB. To run a concept or an app start the mongo daemon with mongod (see help). Then, in a separate shell cd into the concept or app you want to run and do yarn start.

To check the running concept or app visit http://localhost:3000.

When a concept is run it shows a development page that can be used for debugging and manual testing.

Yarn will symlink dependencies so if you make a change to a concept you are using in an app, the only thing you need to do is rebuild the concept with yarn package and restart your app.

Creating New Samples

If you are planning on contributing a new sample app, or you simply want to write a temporary app to test changes to concepts, you should add your new app under samples/. It is important that you put it under samples/ so that you can run it like you run any of the other sample apps. Also, before you do yarn start to run your app, run yarn to install dependencies.

Any app under samples/ is automatically part of the monorepo. Note that there can't be more than one app with the same package name. Thus, if you are starting your new app by copy+pasting another app you should change the package name in the new app's package.json file.

Creating New Concepts

If you are creating a new concept, it is important that you put it under packages/catalog. Any concept under packages/catalog is automatically part of the monorepo and can be used locally by apps under samples/. If you'd like your new concept to appear in the designer, see the designer's readme file for instructions. Note that a concept must have a unique name.

Website

The source of the website is under docs/. For small content changes, you can edit the markdown files directly and create a pull request. Once the changes are merged to master, the live website at deja-vu-platform.com will update.

If you'd like to run the website locally, do the following:

  • install Jekyll
  • cd to docs
  • run bundle install
  • run bundle exec jekyll serve

The website with your local changes will be served at http://localhost:4000.

Installation Help/Tips

The Manual Approach

If yarn --check-files fails, try the following:

  • cd packages/compiler and yarn package
  • cd ../cli and yarn package
  • then yarn --check-files again

If it still doesn't work, double check that you are running node v10 by running node --version in the same shell in which you are running the yarn commands.

Node

  • If you see errors of the kind "npm not found", it means that you don't have npm. Usually, npm is distributed with node, but if you've installed a very old version of node then you won't have npm. If you are on Linux, see the note below.
  • Note to Linux users: to install node you should follow the official Nodejs instructions. Don't do sudo apt install nodejs, it will install a very old version of node (v8) that we don't support.
  • If you are running an old version of node you'll get errors during the installation process. But the error is not going to say "your version of node is too old", so if you see errors check that the version of node you have is v10 by running node --version in the same shell in which you are running the yarn commands.

MongoDB

  • The first time you run mongod, it will fail because there's no /data/db directory. You can create /data/db, or you can ask mongo to use a different directory.