Jubilator

Jubilator is my attempt to make the GitHub repository browsing experience better. I often times find myself looking through some source code on GitHub and in fact, looking at many files at one time. Typically, I would open multiple tabs - one for each file - and possibly open another tab to work my way through directories. It's all very 1995; single request stuff.

You suggest I clone the repository locally. Yeah, I could do that. But I don't like committing myself to that; no pun intended. Seriously, it's a slight hassle, but a hassle for me nonetheless.

No ... I want to look at the source code online and I want to do it in an interface that feels like a text-editor, without the edit part. A nice, source code viewer.

Usage

There are two ways you can use Jubilator: through my hosted instance or by hosting your own instance. To host your own, simply clone the repo and configure a web server to point requests at that directory.

Also, when you go to the hosted instance, notice the bookmarklet at the top. If you put this in your bookmark bar, then when you are looking at a repo on GitHub itself you can click the bookmarklet and a new window will open with that repo loaded into Jubilator (yay!). I have found this to be very useful.

How does it work?

Jubilator is entirely HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Beyond that, Jubilator uses the very awesome GitHub Developer API to:

• Get high-level information about a repository
• Retrieve information about trees (essentially, directories)
• Retrieve the content of a blob (essentially, files)

jQuery is the general JavaScript toolkit of choice because I just love it. For this type of thing it is perfect! It also has some nice plugins that we take advantage of. For now, those are: jLayout, metadata, and sizes (for layout stuff). jLayout is very flexible.

We're using Sammy for the SOFEA stuff; that is - the hash based URL routing. Very nice.

Mustache.js is used for some of the basic content delivery needs. It's worth it to mention that Mustache.js can be used very nicely as a string interpolator:

Mustache.to_html("repos/show/{{user}}/{{repo}}", {user:"thumblemonks", repo:"jubilator"})

Someone get creative and make that shorter.

Jubilator uses Google's code prettifier for syntax highlighting. If I'm not mistaken, GitHub does the same. I've been wrong before.

What it doesn't

It doesn't do a lot of things and it very well could. I would love to use this interface for a doing a lot of interacting with a repository (read-only for now). A short list would include:

• searching through content and/or for file names. Everyone who has seen Jubilator says first, "Does it search?"
• viewing other branches, commits, tags, etc.
• viewing gists
• opening a side panel to see comments, blames, whatever
• keyboard shortcuts for controlling open tabs and such

There are also a few glitches at the moment, but they'll get worked out over time. Short list again:

• Not closing tabs when opening another repo
• Not loading all trees down to a blob when sent a specific address to a blob you have not opened

Why is it called Jubilator?

This is an easy one. gabrielg and I were hanging out at a local bar called Gasthaus and I noticed this picture on the wall (unknown, are those people in the picture). I thought, I want to name a project that. Eventually, I found that project.

Lesson learned, in good time things will wait :)

Who to blame for all of this

Justin "Gus" Knowlden or Thumble Monks. And this is just public domain stuff. What the hell good is a license for something like this, which only really exists as a superficial wrapper on top of goodness? It's like patenting a bag to put stuff in, the process of clicking a button to purchase something online, getting into a car and going somewhere, whatever.

Speaking of that clicking a button thing, it seems like Djikstra had prior-art on shortest-path to a node. No wait, Euclid.