Chintz

[paulmsmith]

Hi @dsingleton

Wondered if here might be the place to discuss what you're doing? As good discourse can get lost on Slack quite quickly.

Have you looked at things like Chintz? "storing front end components in a language-agnostic, component-oriented way, they become more portable, more reusable, more maintainable, and easier to test."

[dsingleton]

@paulmsmith Hi!

You're right, stuff gets lost in Slack too easily. This repo is very much a work in progress (and ultimately a throw-away prototype), but it's a good place to discuss.

I'd not seen Chintz, but I'll take a look. It sounds interesting close to what we're looking at. I think their goals/problems are similar.

• With the range of languages / frameworks / templating systems used by government services, we need a starting point that is language-agnostic, but can be targeted to different environments
• Similarly "component-oriented way, they become more portable, more reusable, more maintainable, and easier to test." is super important.

This repo is an initial test of a single-package, limited to a ruby/rails environment as a mvp. It's next step is (manually) converting the language-agnostic bits to a different environment, and look at the integration required, to look at how we might do an automated conversion.

It feels a bit early to know if Chitz, or something like it, would be a good fit for GDS. But seeing other peoples approaches is super useful.

What are your thoughts?

[paulmsmith]

From what I can glean Chintz was an attempt by the BBC to address the kind of issues that you and the team are doing at GDS.

There is some more detail from the excellent @integralist here: https://davidwalsh.name/designing-simplicity

I primarily sharing Chintz as some food for thought / reading material rather than a recommendation.. I tend to share things I think might be useful, you can read them at your leisure.

In the meantime what you're doing makes sense to me. Not sure if I've already shared but there was excellent discussion of the 'holy grail' for front-end templates here: https://github.com/cloudfour/drizzle/issues/83

[Integralist]

I've since left BBC for BuzzFeed. So your best best is to talk to @pgchamberlin as I'm unsure of whatever happened with Chintz (as i worked on a different team while i was there)

[pgchamberlin]

Hey everyone. We haven't actually taken Chintz very far at the BBC, but I think it's a strong idea and would be very happy to discuss it in detail - and perhaps contribute to a prototype using it?

For our own use case we found we could align on component rendering technologies so the platform-agnostic USP was no longer such a big deal, and we went into "don't reinvent the wheel" mode :smile:

It does seem that this is might be exactly the use case it was designed for though, and I'd love to take the idea further.