October Update

It’s been 6 months since my last update so this post will be going over quite a few updates.

Website

First, this website was recently rewritten to use Astro (again). Hopefully now that I’m happy with how things are setup again I’ll be posting more updates. One of the main reasons for this is to eventually integrate some of the Svelte components I’ve been working on for Ligature into a playground on this site.

Ligature REPL

The main code base for Ligature is getting to be in a pretty good position. Also the Wander scripting language is starting to be usable. Since I’m now at the point where I want to play around with it outside of unit tests, I made a very basic REPL using JLine3. It’s in the ligature-kt repository under ligature-repl. It’s not worth the effort at the moment to have a downloadable release but it has been very useful while developing Wander. And while I don’t think the REPL is the ideal way to interact with Ligature and Wander I suspect it will come in handy to have around.

Ligature Desktop

So if a REPL isn’t the ideal way of interacting with Ligature what is? I’ve always imagined that a more traditional web application or desktop application would be best. Ligature-Web is where I’ve been working on a Svelte-Kit based web application. That’s coming along, but I think there is also a need for a desktop application, since it can be a little weird to run a local server (actually it’s two, the backend that’s based on the JVM and the web application itself that’s node based) just to use an application.

To fix this I’ve begun work again on a Tauri based application at https://github.com/almibe/ligature-desktop. To help with this project I removed the components that can be shared beween Ligature Desktop and Ligature Web and put them in their own repository here https://github.com/almibe/ligature-components. These components include the UI for managing Datasets, adding and removing Statements, and running Wander queries. Results of queries can be viewed as text, a table, or a graph. This work has kind of taken priority over Ligature Web, so that project will probably not be the best of shape (ie, it doesn’t work currently) for a little bit.

Like the REPL, Ligature Desktop isn’t far along enough to merit a separate release yet, but I suspect it won’t be long. To learn how to run a development build of Ligature Desktop (and the backend server) see this new documentation.

Current Plans

With the main code base in good shape and a working Desktop application around for testing the backend, my plans are to begin using Ligature more in day to day work and adding features to Wander as they are needed. Soon I hope to write about the various case studies I have planned and also to do releases of the server and desktop application.

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