Proof of Concept

Jun 16, 2021

See the code for this post on GitHub

I now have a functioning POC that can add, edit, and delete astronomical observations—at least in the web browser, and for a single page load. And it's all happy path. If you forget to fill in a celestial object for your observation, for instance, the app will crash. But form validation can wait for a future iteration.

The POC stage has given me a good first impression of Svelte. I haven't explored all of its features yet, but I like what I've seen so far. I imagine I'll be refactoring the Observation data store as things progress and I become more familiar with the Svelte community's best practices. But so far I'm impressed by how much can be done with relatively little code.

I'm already starting to second guess my decision to use Sveltestrap for the component library. The library seems a little rough around the edges, and I'm running into an issue around data binding with the datepicker input component. It may be an issue with the library itself, but could just as well be an issue with the way I'm using it. I may explore other component library options for fun. And besides, Svelte has made me pretty confident I could swap component libraries with relatively little effort.

I'm happy to see something to interact with on the screen. Next I'd like to focus on replacing the select input for picking celestial objects with a more user-friendly autocomplete search box. If I can get it to talk to a database to search for celestial objects, it will be a good first step toward unifying the front and back ends.