[Suggestion] refactor using modern Web tech

partridgejiang / Kekule.js

A Javascript cheminformatics toolkit.

http://partridgejiang.github.io/Kekule.js

MIT License

248 stars 61 forks source link

[Suggestion] refactor using modern Web tech #253

Open lsdsjy opened 2 years ago

lsdsjy commented 2 years ago

Hi @partridgejiang . People all love this work! But would you consider to refactor(or fork) this project using modern Web develpment tools & techniques?

To name a few, we can use:

TypeScript for better DX
native ES6+ classes & setter/getters for simplicity
native ES Modules instead of global namespaces
modern UI libraries like React, Vue or Svelte for the GUI parts of composer and other widgets
modern tools like esbuild/rollup for bundling & optimizing
...

And it'd be much easier to (re)develop and integrate into modern web projects.

I know it'd be quite an effort, but I'll be glad to help!

(And another suggestion, we can use GitHub issue labels to make issue-tracking and searching easier.)

partridgejiang commented 2 years ago

Hi @lsdsjy, thanks a lot for those reasonable suggestions. The project starts at about nine years ago, so many techniques it used are quite historical and really should be updated for the future. Moreover, some more aggressive enhancements may be applied as well, including:

Split more time-consuming jobs (e.g. molecule canonicalization, ring perception) into web worker.
Introduce more asynchronous functions/methods for molecule algorithms and chem data IO.
Utilize compiled language (e.g. rust) and wasm to rewrite some modules for better performace.
...

Anyway, those modifications require quite a lot of time and efforts. When the refactor begins, a new repository will be created and your helps are always appreciated, :).

lsdsjy commented 2 years ago

That's great! Looking forward to working on the new repo!

filoscoder commented 2 years ago

any updates?

partridgejiang commented 2 years ago

Not with significant progress yet. The past year is spent mainly on the spectroscopy module and currently I am engaging in another project myself. So please be patient, :).