Developer Colophon

A Development Environment for Non-Developers

Our past projects (e.g. PLAE, NetCreate) have used a UNIX-style command-line development environment with Git source control. Our end user researchers have needed to be comfortable using Git tools and the command line to download and deploy the software. While we've made the process as easy to follow as possible, it still requires a high comfort level with confusing computer concepts. We'd like to eliminate this from our new system.

The current R&D we're doing is to use Electron as a packaging tool to bundle deployable versions of the software that run like a regular desktop app on our target platforms (Macintosh currently). Integrating Electron into our existing command-line environment will require several tool changes and additions:

Switch from Gulp/Brunch to Webpack 4 with associated workflow changes
Recreate development QOL features such as "livereload" for three distinct subsystems
Adding our AppServer to the Electron main process
Port existing server code to Electron standard
Port existing LANClient code to WebPack 4 modules
Create an ElectronApp GUI for the AppServer
Refactor code to support packaging and network updates in Electron
Add remote testing and logging capability

Prototyping

This repo, MEME-PROTO is the prototype boilerplate to create all of those features. Once this is stable, we will create a clean version for the MEME tool itself.

See Development Updates for current state of the project: