Handlebars in an Ember.js styled Rust-based MVC SPA compiled to WASM

[drauschenbach]

I've been a huge fan of Handlebars for the past decade, and a big Ember.js user over the years. Thank you so much for both @wycats!.

I'm "all-in" on template-based SPAs. I cut my teeth on web programming in 1994, when CGI programs had to be written to "emit HTML". It was an industry-wide disaster that led to a multitude of template languages, ranging from Mustache to Handlebars to Velocity to Cold Fusion to PHP. Years of technical debt solved... for less time than I could have imagined.

I could never understand why "reactive programming" took hold, perpetuated by the Facebook marketing machine. JS that emitted HTML, marginalizing web designers, and requiring any "re-skinning" of an app to become a full rewrite. That model eventually even infected the Ember project. I still don't get it.

As Ember.js started to age, for that and other reasons, I found myself wishing I could rewrite all my Ember controllers/models/adapters in Rust, compiled to WASM.

I sat on the sideline for years, but at the encouragement of Greg Johnston, inventor of Leptos, I've finally kicked off a project that kicks around ideas relating to how to realize Ember idioms using type-safe Rust compiled to WASM. Most of it is made possible by the impressive trunk Rust-based WASM packager project.

https://gitlab.com/megalithic-llc/auric-spa/rust

If you have some thoughts, join in on the discussion!

[mcdev7777]

This is a very interesting direction. Combining Handlebars-style templating with Rust and WASM could be a strong fit for type-safe, template-driven SPA architecture. I’d be curious to see how routing, state, and template updates are handled in practice.

[drauschenbach]

I'm currently working on a router, which seems like the most important starting point. actix-router compiles to WASM! So, that seems like a logical starting point.

Once that's done, routes should be able to define a model() function, and fortunately, the jsonapi_core project just came on-line to handle the plumbing for an adapter architecture for REST and JSON-API.