When it comes to a foundational starting base for developing Steem applications, it's hard to look past busy.org which has one of the best UI's for the Steem blockchain and it is well-coded and organised, offering up their client-side ReactJS code on Github here.
While I have worked with React and have nothing personally against it, I do find React and Redux to be quite overbearing. I am a member of the Aurelia Javascript Framework core team and naturally, I was looking for a starting base built with Aurelia instead of React.
Steem is still in its infancy stage, so the only way an Aurelia based Steem application was going to exist is if I put on my open source gloves and made one myself.
So, that's what I did...
Admittedly, it is still early days, but the aim is to create a starting base for those seeking a well-architected UI for working with the Steem blockchain. My intentions are also self-serving in some respects, as it provides me with the ideal starting point for any Steem applications I plan on building.
At the moment the code isn't in a state where I would use it for new projects, but the goal is to achieve feature parity with Busy.org and Steemit.com in the next month or two. The codebase will be intentionally simple and easy to understand, with documentation and unit testing.
The motivation for this was providing developers with a choice of another foundational starting base for Steem applications, but free from being tethered to an existing platform or project.
While Busy.org is great, it's very much styled and built to the feature-list and standards of the busy.org team. If you want to build an application with it, you have to remove and restyle quite a bit to suit your needs. Think of Aurelia Steem as a framework for building Steem applications, a blank canvas.
The documentation for the Steem Javascript library is also difficult for newcomers and missing certain features and parameters, so wrappers around existing API methods have been provided and the application will serve as a reference in how to use certain Steem functions.
Features
- Written in TypeScript using modern ECMAScript 2015+ features (and polyfills where needed)
- Uses Aurelia Store (which wraps RxJS) for state management providing a powerful state management solution comparable in simplicity with MobX or VueX. Also compatible with Redux developer tools, so you can debug your state in Chrome or Firefox
- Webpack 4 for build/module bundling/asset management
- Code splitting on a route level. Each route is split into a separate bundle, reducing overall application size and eliminating wasted bandwidth
- Clean separation of concerns (services, UI components, common components, assets)
- Unit testing and end-to-end tests
Get the code on Github
In the spirit of open source, a repository can be found here which will be regularly updated with new functionality and features where time permits. Read the documentation to understand how the application should be run.