elm-scripting/README.md

A tool to generate HTML code from Elm source in the terminal using QuickJS.

Design

QuickJS (Qjs) is a JavaScript runtime, similar to V8 or SpiderMonkey, but lighter and faster.

As any runtime, Qjs can interpret JavaScript code, but it is not a web browser. It has no concept of an HTML document.

To bridge this gap, we add a minimal DOM implementation.

Next, we concatenate this with the Elm JavaScript output and an app launcher snippet, then ask Qjs to interpret all of it.

Limitations

• No event loop
• Hence, no TEA; the main function must return a static view
• The Elm app module must be called "Main"
• Nodes can only have one parent (this should always be the case)

Usage

1. Clone this repository and navigate into your local copy
2. Run elm init.
3. Create src/Hello.elm with the following content:

module Hello exposing(main)

import Html exposing (p, text)

main = p [] [text "Hello World!"]

4. Run ./build.sh src/Hello.elm; this generates the corresponding HTML code:

<p>
Hello World!
</p>

Prior Work

There are more complete tools for generating static sites with Elm:

• elm-pages
• elmstatic
• elm-starter
• siteelm

You should probably consider using one of them instead of this one. :)