Get Aurelia Great (GAG - call for action)

Lack of advanced tutorials is often cites as one of the most important reasons for Aurelia lagging behind frameworks like Angular, Vue or React. While Angular and React are suported by two of four biggest software companies, Vue seems to be able to carry its own because of the relative simplicity of that framework.

From infrequent visits to Aurelia Discuss Gitter channel and to some extend posts in the new Aurelia Discourse channel, I often see significant interest in Aurelia CLI, immediatelly followed by some kind of disappointment because of CLI’s “immature” state (see this very current discussion :point_up: December 29, 2017 8:04 AM as a possible example of this situation).

Since it is not likely that some big entity like Amazon :smirk: will adopt Aurelia and get a large development and documentation team to add to our core team efforts, it is pretty clear that this has to be done by Aurelia Community (I suspect that this same idea is the explanation behind Vue’s success.

I have spent all of my time (not just “free” time) to help ensuring Aurelia’s success - but so far have focused on projects executed by smaller teams, in the domain of two organizations Aurelia UI Toolkits and Aurelia Tools. In that time, I proposed several other projects and while the initial response was nice, nobody was anxious to join such efforts, always citing the lack of time. This either means that folks did not believe that I could lead such efforts, or they are really interested in Aurelia only as a tool for their own projects.

So, this time I want to try again to search for a group of people that are interested in helping to create the next outer concentric circle around the Aurelia Core - mostly by creating Aurelia Documentation and Samples from the view point of an application developer - hopefully resulting with the documentation that fits the Aurelia framework users (as different from Aurelia framework developers).

So, this being a call for action is already too big article; I will only share one of the projects I am trying to raise to its feet: cli based skeletons which demonstrate implementation of Skeleton-Navigation samples as CLI samples. In other words this projects content are “expanded” Navigation skeletons that are manually crafted as if made by a future version of the Aurelia CLI tool that will be able to create such skeletons from start to end.

The creation of these skeletons are described in Gitbook Aurelia CLI Adventures book which was written ahead of the actual code in GitHub - reaction to my beef with world class software with less than minimalistic documentation.

If this invitation can result with 5-10 collaborators that want to help Get Aurelia Great - I will give all of my time to help organize and manage such efforts (read “do all crap that nobody wants to do”).

I am curious to see what happens with this call for action.

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I’m interested to join this.
Although I didn’t use CLI tool I believe I can help in the other parts.

I tested CLI tool before, a couple months ago and it was causing me wasting time on dealing with different issues of the CLI tool and I ended up with the skeleton-webpack.

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Since Aurelia is a framework supported by a commercial company (bluespire) I thought it would have had a part of the developments made by the open source community and a bigger one made by paid devs. Our company builds custom software and we pay annuals fees (visual studio, kendo UI pro, etc…) so for our point of view, paying a reasonable price to get a professional framework will be the best solution. I’d love to contribute more, but really the time is something I don’t have right now. The thing I regularly do, is reporting bugs when I found them. I think there might be other people happy to pay in order to get more speed in the developments (cli, ux, better tooling, server side rendering, bug fixes, examples,… ) At this point it is not clear to me what is the business model of bluespire and how the future will be. Aurelia is one of the best framework out there, I think the lack of momentum is not only a community fault, but also a lack of investments in order to promote the framework.

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Thanks for sharing your view @enrico-padovani and for the chance to respond to your comments.

Please note that I am “speaking” only for myself and have no relationship with bluespire nor insight into its status. bluespire is (as far as I know) Rob Eisenberg “rendered” as a business entity created to offer technical support for companies using Aurelia as their tool of choice. It is reasonably to believe that Rob taking full time job at Microsoft was unable to create sufficient income from bluespire even for a single person. The fact that nearly Javascript frameworks are free supports that belief. In other words, Aurelia was created and continue to be evolved is the result of community involvement only. My own observation about the need to increase the community involvement is driven solely by frequent comments on Aurelia insufficient documentation and the obvious fact that the Aurelia core team cannot double their current efforts to address that issue.

Your description “I’d love to contribute more, but really the time is something I don’t have right now” is the response I get nearly every time when I ask Aurelia Community members for help on a given project. My own situation could be very similar had I not decided that helping a cause I strongly believe in is more important than making the salary I am used to have (by no means am I suggesting to follow my example to anyone, by the way :wink:).

Being in charge of several larger companies that had to sell their (software) product without complete documentation in order to stay in business (with a few notable exceptions, there is never enough money to do everything right), I am trying to help this specific issue, since it is something that can be done without adding work to the core team.

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Thanks for your interest @y-io - I am delighted by your response. This specific project is a typical case of development that intersects the work of the Aurelia core team led by @EisenbergEffect and @JeroenVinke without disrupting it with the “too many cooks in the kitchen” syndrome. You could think of it as a preparatory work for the next version of Aurelia CLI that will be able to create (generate) all current skeleton-navigation samples.

This (first draft of a) set of manually built samples has a dual role:

  • to serve as help to the CLI core team (that is indeed the initial motivation to do this, after discussing the future of CLI with @JeroenVinke, who is my partner in several existing projects)
  • to be used by any Aurelia developer interested in a well documented skeleton that can be subsequently expanded using the CLI tooling.

Let’s wait some more to see if we can find a few more collaborators.

I have recently committed to reallocating some of my personal development time to writing Aurelia tutorials on my blog. If I end up in source code trying to figure out how to use a feature, I plan on documenting it to make the next devs life easier. My first two posts discuss manging JWT and providing config from a .NET Core app. Knowing the communities need for docs on a given topic would help me prioritize. Id also be happy to submit a PR for any of my blog content that fills a void in the doc HUB.

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Hi @jonathan.eckman

I like your approach to problem solving (If I end up in source code trying to figure out how to use a feature, I plan on documenting it to make the next devs life easier), because I am doing the same for the last couple years since I am actively involved with Aurelia. A few blogs (formatted as Gitbook

are examples of the areas of my interest, confirmed to be of value to Aurelia community. Rather than writing these documents alone, I decided to accelerate that work, by soliciting collaboration from the community as stated in my first post in this thread.

I am trying to formalize this effort by creating the Editorial Board, defining format and structure for community created documentation, place to propose new documents, management of ongoing projects, etc. As this will take some time, I wanted to find a few motivated developers to tackle some of my existing “books”.

I understand your point of view and it shows your passion about the framework. Something I’d like to do is to add aurelia in this comparison repo: https://github.com/webcomponents/custom-elements-everywhere/issues/50 it bothers me to not see it in the list!

I’ll keep an eye on what you are planning todo.

@enrico-padovani: your idea for helping is as good as anything I am trying to do, with the caveat that it intersects a bit more with core team activities than writing samples and related documentation.

Thank you for this conversation.

@adriatic I feel like we’ve done some pretty awesome stuff with Aurelia recently where I work, but I’m finding it difficult finding time to write about it.

What’s the absolute simplest, most direct means of posting helpful Aurelia content? I do not mind if someone repurposes my word vomit into something beautiful.

Side Q: Is it still acceptable to post about cool Aurelia stuff on a personal blog, or should it go elsewhere?

Hi @alexdresko

Let me start with Side question: in the ideal case where the complete design and schedule for Aurelia Documentation would be already in place, we would not be discussing this subject. So, while it is just fine to post cool stuff about Aurelia anywhere, having it in a central location with good support for search seems like a very good first step leading towards full integration with the http://aurelia.io site.

I am pretty sure that your idea about “limited participation” where you write the articles usinh shorthand (that we can design for this task) would be well received. As mentioned before, I am anxious to organize the creation of the “user level” (software developers) type of documentation, so if your shorthand is created with that intent in plan (and would not mind helping along the “technical writers” team if / when they get stuck with your texts), we have a good step forward.

I’d like to see a PWA guide. I feel like PWAs are becoming more important and Aurelia is lacking in this story.

I’ve tried a few times, but as others have said I haven’t had a lot of concentrated times. Here’s my existing question on SO that doesn’t have any answers yet.

I also put out a post on this Discourse.

Here’s a related Github issue.

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I’m interested, although I’m not sure how useful I can be.

I’ve made one decent application in aurelia and played with it for the odd little other personal project. I haven’t needed to look through the source code (which is a great credit to the team!) other than for the cli and generally have kept to the docs, and where I’ve done something I thought was a bit non-mainstream have chucked it on my blog https://winterlimelight.com/tag/aurelia/

Thank you for spearheading this. For some reason I thought that Aurelia might be withering away.

I personally have not done anything except some playing around with Aurelia. I was not planning on using it because it does not seem to have the momentum that other frameworks are having (this may just be my perception and not reality.)

I do not believe I can contribute because I’m not using the framework. I have been learning React and ASP.NET Core 2 using the SmartAdmin template located https://wrapbootstrap.com/theme/smartadmin-responsive-webapp-WB0573SK0

In my opinion, SmartAdmin would be a fantastic starting point for an Aurelia version. I do not work for MyOrange, who wrote SmartAdmin. I will contact them to see if they would be willing to invest some time making a version using Aurelia. I seriously doubt they will consider my request. If that is the case then perhaps someone from the community would be able to convert the React version to Aurelia.

Thanks,
Dave

I’m interested, although I’m not sure how useful I can be.

@winter_limelight - I plan to provide enough topics (information in how to help), create polls for other community members to provide their ideas on what all might be needed, and create the editorial board (a few community members and a few core team members) that would select from the pool of tasks having the overal benefit for aurelia in mind.

Note: your blog points in the center of my own favorite domain (Aurelia applications Identity Management (aka authentication and authorization), which is not nearly enough covered and I have spent relatively a lot of preparation time to write about this topic.

Hi @Dave

I do appreciate your remarks a lot. My own fear that people not yet immersed in Aurelia world might develop the idea how Aurelia is withering, is the key motivator that led me to organize the community to help addressing the most important actions that community can do without disrupting the core team’s work.

You are presenting me with a catch-22 case, which hopefully still can be resolved - as you might be the guy who can “port” SmartAdmin template the collection of Aurelia templates. Creating such collection and writing technical documentation for it is a perfect example of a project for GAG - and since I know SmartAdmin app I can tell you that making it Aurelia based would not be too difficult.

The following is the email thread I had with MyOrange last night:

Me: Hello, would you consider doing an Aurelia version of your product?

MyOrange: We might in the future, right now there isn’t much demand for it in the bootstrap community.

Me: Thank you for considering it. It’s kind of a catch-22, having it in your product would definitely create more interest in Aurelia. I do have a couple of more questions. If me or someone else converts your React version of SmartAdmin could they contribute the Aurelia source code to you? What type of licensing would this individual need to do that?

Waiting for a response from MyOrange. Interesting that we both used the catch-22 phrase :slight_smile:

Hi all,
thank you for this honesty and this impulse to do something. I have been considering for some time how I could support Aurelia.
Im using Aurelia since 10/2016 private and in business - from small POC’s to Enterprise scale - and have the strong desire to “give something back”. Im not a native english spaeker so i think documenting is not the right choice for me.
I somehow read an issue (or simillar) about “Hosting the Aurelia UX Showcase should be done”. I think i could do this - this would match my free-time. What are you thinking about that?

Oh, of course i could share “tons of examples” of sources…

Hello @cusdom

Very few of us in the Aurelia community are native english speakers (i know many more that are not, myself included). While I do not want to push you into the area where you are not comfortable, let me point out that writing technical documentation in the context of “Aurelia community writers movement” does not mean necessarily writing manuals for Aurelia framework. I proposed Aurelia CLI knowing that it is a critical part of Aurelia that is least documented (because it is the newest).

Your own suggestion (Oh, of course i could share “tons of examples” of sources…) is a perfect example of a potential contribution, where you are still expected to write the tutorial like document that explains these samples. I envision that all kinds of samples are indeed extended framework documentation, activity that is at the core of Aurelia Community contributions.

Please do stay tuned in this and related doscussions as I am preparing the context in which our subsequent discussions would be easier to conduct

@Dave - I am not surprised by the response you got from MyOrange - it is the same I got hundreds of times from various vendors. The solution is really in our hands, assuming that we can muster sufficient amount of work ourselves. As an example, I will point out the Commuity work resulting with three significant contributions - adding the integration between Aurelia framework on respected GUI toolkits:

The first two were designed, implemented, tested and supported by members of the (Aurelia community) group Aurelia-UI-Toolkits and became sufficiently popular that a relatively big company (Syncfusion) decided to create the bridge of their own GUI SDK to Aurelia, with their own developers, guided by our members, and using our own “bridge framework”.

This experience tells me that we would be better of by tackling the work on SmartAdmin assuming that:

  1. Our internal poll (to be created yet) confirms that there is interest in this template
  2. We find at least one community member who is interested in doing that work

The Community members will most certainly help with anything that needs a bit of pushing ahead.