Hello, all!
We, the Anvil DAs (@ryan, @brooke and yours truly), are always looking to write content that will make your developer experience a little bit nicer, so we’re looking for suggestions from you.
What would you like to see from us? Are there any tutorials you think we’re missing? Any topic you’d like to see a blog post on? Let’s us know on this thread!
I would like a tutorial or blog post on setting up a RESTful API with http endpoints, for both providing and consuming data.
Maybe this might also be a good place to use/show off the secrets module and/or data files cashing?
Broadly speaking, regardless of subject, I’m always in favor of big-picture intros that support theory-of-operation guides.
This provides readers, new and old, with the overall context, including the designer/developer’s thinking and terminology, in which the rest of the documentation then makes eminent sense.
You get to see whether the subject is an appropriate solution to your immediate problem, before spending a lot of time going down rabbit-holes.
I’d like to see content about software development best practices and how Anvil helps us implement them. Or, in other words, how can I best develop using Anvil in a way that is maintainable and easy to change? Meredydd’s talk at the first Anvil user group is an example of what I have in mind (using a model class to add logic to a Data Tables row object rather than putting such logic in the form code).
One recurring question in the forum is about performances.
There are posts commonly referred when dealing with these questions, but it would be nice to have one blog post that lists all the performance traps one needs to avoid and all the tricks one needs to use.
First understand why the app can be slow, then explain how to make it faster.
A guide on integrating problematic JavaScript libraries would be great.
That’s exactly what I said in response to the same question on the Discord server
Automated testing, and how to do it easy in the online IDE.
A completely automated with complete coverage test suite could be scary for many Anvil developers, and overkilling for many small apps. There are many cases for which the simpler option would work just fine.
It would be nice to have a blog that talks about testing and addresses it at different levels. Something like:
I would love to see a resource on how to make a scroll-able panel. My naive solution just doesn’t work on Safari, so there’s something I’m missing for sure. This seems to be a fairly fundamental feature that I couldn’t find any info on.
I think a nice blog summarizing this conversation would be greatly useful.
Anything multi-threaded, calling thrift services, advanced UI topics
Howdy!
Just in idea; But some tutorials about front-end design would be awesome!
Maybe “how to convert a simple figma design to anvil”.
Or “how to create your own Material Design 3 design”
I’d like a blog/tutorial on all the breath of the GoogleMap functionality!
Being a newbie, I would like a bird’s eye view of anvil to see how things are related to each other. Ideally, a diagram. It took me nearly an hour of reading docs and making experiments to figure out what Native Libraries are (is, actually!), how /_/theme/ is related to assets, what anvil.js does, what are HTML templates and why it is best not to touch that… I guess it is possible to draw a picture of all the Anvil so that such things would be evident at the first glance.
A tutorial on WebAssembly best practices would also be appreciated.
I also wonder what not to do. Anvil gives so much freedom that it is easy to abuse it. You know, some people do not enjoy breaking their toys…
Along the lines of…
…I’d really like a tutorial that walks through the default theme.css and standard-page.html and explains what each part does (in a way that assumes only basic knowledge of CSS and HTML) to enable us to tweak things more confidently and efficiently.
I’d love to see a tutorial/how-to on collaborating with other people on an Anvil project via Github. I know there’s a workflow there that allows the full range of what I’d expect to have in a team environment (feature branches, pull requests, etc) all integrated with Anvil. It’d be nice to have that spelled out.
How about a blog on workarounds to achieve SEO for anvil apps, e.g. by including the app in an iframe on a static webpage, and discuss site loading performance issues and mitigations (assets for you app will be downloaded each time when in an iframe?).