Amok – Live Editing for JavaScript | Hacker News Reader

Amok – Live Editing for JavaScript

amokjs.com

63 pointscaspervonb21 comments

Light table can do that too: http://www.chris-granger.com/2013/04/28/light-table-040/

Awesome. The integration is really cool, though that's totally without digging in at all to compare it to live editing and workspaces (https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/workspaces).

Looks like Firefox supports some form of remote debugging too (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Remote_Debugg...), though looks like it might be more painful to integrate with (https://github.com/caspervonb/amok/issues/10).

I do wonder how well this would integrate with SPAs - seems like it would be great for testing events/handlers/etc, but might be weirder (or at least possibly more work than just refreshing) for testing app starts and the like.

Support for clients are definitely coming, JavaScriptCore and Node would be awesome, but one step at a time, trying to support multiple protocols before 1.0 could become overwhelming very quickly.

I haven't used any of these, but curious if this compares to emacs':

SwankJs https://github.com/swank-js/swank-js

JsSlime https://github.com/segv/jss

skewer-mode https://github.com/skeeto/skewer-mode

I'm trying to understand how this is different than browserSync [1].

[1] http://www.browsersync.io/

I don't believe BrowserSync does 'hot code loading' like Amok is doing.

Hot code loading is when you update the running code without reloading the page, preserving any state in the program running.

If you watch the start of the Amok video you'll see author changes the elasticity value but the timer at the top keeps ticking and the ball doesn't reset to the start position like it would do if the page were simply refreshed. (BrowserSync refreshes the page when JS is changed).

Does it refresh all functions? Including the anonymous ones in already attached event handlers?

I have done something similar recently but it requires any live-reload-able function to have a name.

Yep, everything including anonymous functions.

I see the FAQ says no callbacks. So as long as there aren't any callbacks, running app state should be preserved through code updates?

The video demos a React component, great. I hope amok will work with my current workflow, using jspm (rather than webpack or something).

It's the opposite, if the application has no callbacks, how can anything be live edited when none of your code is hooked up to anything.

Old callbacks can call to newer versions of modified functions. The live-reloading code I made needed named functions for this reason.

I've really liked using this. I donated!

Could it be possible to use this with headless node applications for debugging?

Like, phantomjs?

That's actually something I haven't thought about! file an issue?

What editor is used in the demo video?

As mentioned, Gedit 3.x. Dark adawaita theme applied globally to the entire gnome desktop.

Looks like the Gnome 3 version of Gedit.

Gedit, I think.

Does it work with closures?

It does.

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