Refactor SoSSim as a package

[jakobaxelsson]

Currently, it takes quite long to load SoSSim in the browser. Some options to investigate:

• Use pyodide directly instead of through pyscript. There isn't really any essential features added by pyscript, and some sources indicate that pyodide starts significantly faster.
• Convert SoSSim to a package, and create a wheel file which can be loaded by pyodide. According to pyodide's documentation, this should be significantly faster, both because it is fetched as a single file instead of many files, and because it is a pre-compiled binary.

The potential drawbacks of these solutions are:

• The build step becomes mandatory, so whenever a change is made during development, the wheel file needs to be built before they can be tested in the browser. This is manageable manually, but it could also be automated by invoking a wheel build in the web server whenever the wheel is fetched and some files are changed (can be enlisted using gitpython).
• According to the pyodide documentation, the wheel file name is required to be on a specific format, which includes a version number. This means that the link to the script in the html file would need to be changed on each new build (at least when the version number changes). However, in a way this is already happening in pyscript, since the pyconfig.toml file is generated by build and must be regenerated when the file structure changes. So the html-file could import the content of a certain file whose name is always the same. That file is generated by the build step and contains the file name of the wheel file (and possibly other things, such as imported packages). It could be as simple as the list of packages, including the wheel, and the file can be fetched in JS using fetch(url).then(r => r.text()).then(t => some_expression_to_process_the_text(t)).
• A first step could be to change the pyconfig.toml into pyconfig.json. This would make the file directly readable from JS, and then the same file could be used independently if it is through pyscript or pyodide. UPDATE: It is only the next version of Pyscript that supports json files, so this does not work right now.

Making SoSSim into a package has other benefits. At some point, it will probably be desirable to put an outer loop that calls the simulator for a number of different scenarios and collects statistics, e.g. to evaluate how well a proposed SoS mechanism performs in different situations.

[jakobaxelsson]

Implementation steps:

• [x] Create a package and the necessary files for generating the wheel, including adding an option in the build script for wheel generation. Possibly, it should also remove old wheel files.
• [ ] Rewrite build script to generate json instead, and change config file name accordingly in html file.
• [x] Modify build script so that the fetched files are removed from the config file, and the package wheel file is added under packages. The building of the wheel file should also include building the config file.
• [ ] Create a generic html file for pyodide, that fetches the config file, installs all the packages mentioned using micropip, and runs the sossim.py script. This should replace the current sossim.html.

[jakobaxelsson]

It turns out that the current stable version of pyscript does not support json config files, it is planned for the next release. Here is an alternative plan:

• [ ] Rewrite the build script to generate a json config file containing packages and files and the command used to start execution.
• [ ] Create a generic html file for pyodide, that fetches the config file, installs all the packages using micropip, reads all the module files and imports them. Finally, it calls the execution command.
• [x] Create a package and the necessary files for generating the wheel, including adding an option in the build script for wheel generation. Possibly, it should also remove old wheel files.
• [x] Modify build script so that the fetched files are removed from the config file, and the package wheel file is added under packages. The building of the wheel file should also include building the config file.

[jakobaxelsson]

A problem when generating the packages is that there is currently also the copy of domed in this directory. A solution that packages sossim also requires to finally remove domed from this repo.

[jakobaxelsson]

The repository has been refactored as follows:

• sossim is now a package.
• The browser version and all its relevant files are now moved to the directory app.
• The pyconfig file is now generated to load the wheel file of sossim as a package rather than individual files.
• The build script is now also able to generate the wheel file.
• The domed package is now completely removed, and this repository relies on the pypi domed package instead of a local copy.

[jakobaxelsson]

To make the app html file completely generic, the title element from the head has been removed. The intention was to set this dynamically in the user interface, but there does not seem to be an easy and obvious way to do this in domed?

[jakobaxelsson]

Issue with title now resolved.

[jakobaxelsson]

Returning to the issue with pyodide vs. pyscript. Given that the pyscript html file for the app is now completely generic, a similar generic file can be made for pyodide. It only needs to get information about what packages to load, otherwise all the rest can be hardcoded as in the case for pyscript.

To get the package information, the pyconfig.toml file needs to be parsed, at least rudimentary.

[jakobaxelsson]

The file app/sossim_pyodide.html is now working. It does the same thing as sossim.html but without using pyscript. However, the startup time is almost the same, so it does not provide much benefit.