So, I made a thing.
I’ve been meaning to host projects I’ve written on my own server, and it’s now available (and has been for a little while, but whatever). The tool I’ve made to do so is here, along with some of my rationale, but I figure I’ll talk about it a bit here.
The site itself exists for both practical and ideological reasons. On the practical side, I don’t have a particularly reliable network connection, so having hosting locally available is helpful.
I’ve talked before about the problems I’ve had with the current clone/fork situation, now it’s time to get into solutions.
I’ve recently mentioned my issues with clone(), though I stopped short of proposing something better. A big part of that is that if I were to propose something better, I’d have to address the other major issues with process creation on *nix.
The clone system call needs a better wrapper, at least on Linux. See, you might have heard about this neat containers thing. Run processes with some actual separation and (the start of) security! Let yourself feel the freedom! And they’re great… as long as you’re not calling the libc functions yourself.
Just recently, Microsoft open-sourced PowerShell, and released a Linux version. As a long-time Linux user who gave up Windows for anything other than gaming long ago, this only holds vague interest. I’ve never used PowerShell intentionally, the limit of my experience was when flailing around trying to find something not cmd.exe.
I’ve had coworkers say good things about it, enough that I’ve decided to give it a look through now. I’ve really only given it a cursory glance so far, but it does seem to have interesting bits here and there.
One of the things I’ve been poking around with recently is a hosting solution for APIs on this site (AKA the reverse proxy I’ve mentioned before). I’ve seen things that I’ve liked (mostly sandstorm), and while I’m certainly going to take things from a bunch of other places, it looks like I’m gonna have to do my own. Again. Which I totally don’t regret at all.
But, that’s not what this post is about.
Working with JavaScript and HTML has reminded me that I haven’t seen a UI toolkit that I’ve liked. I’ve seen and used ones that I thought were done well, and that I didn’t mind using, but there has always been a mismatch between the way UIs seem to be assembled and what I want to do.
Some background: I’ve used Qt extensively (mostly 4.x, but some 5.x as well), HTML (3.