Wednesday, August 19, 2015

ambado.js - releasing an experimental, lighweight and fast web app framework

I am a releasing a new open source project called ambado.js, which aims to build a lightweight and fast web app framework. It is experimental, so I will try a lot of ideas I have in mind, and is not really useful for production releases at the moment.

I have been building a number of webapps for our company (www.vlifesciences.com) for consolidating various platforms and services that we offer (drug discovery, toxicity etc.). One of the issues I have been observed during these developments was that of the load time for these apps, which are a lot dependent on loading of the initial scripts, html, css and images. There is no particular emphasis on caching in most frameworks, that would have improved quite a bit of load time and ultimately user experience. Recently though, I found basket.js (http://addyosmani.github.io/basket.js/), which is a wonderful library that does caching. Although, basket.js does a good job, I wanted to extend the idea to a framework that uses the concept of caching itself from ground up, rather than attaching the piece of code externally.

So two days ago, I started putting some basic code together, and now I feel it is kind of usable for the world to see and progress further. The code is hosted on GitHub, and is called ambado.js (https://github.com/tovganesh/ambado.js). ambado.js uses lazy but aggressive loading of resources, currently using the basket.js library. Additionally, it provides a simple framework to build very simplistic UI.

P.S:
Ambado, by the way, is Konkani for Indian Hog Plum (https://www.flickr.com/photos/dinesh_valke/3393914087). We also use it to make pickles, which I love taking with plain rice :-) Although, I only recently tasted it after almost a decade!

PPS:
ambado.js is at a very early stage, things are going to break!