Frontend development of Bloque 64, the decentralized Hispanic newspaper (1)

First task that we want to achieve

The Hispanic community of Cervantes on hive.blog is full of enthusiastic and enterprising people. With the advent of the Smart Media Contract (SMT) and the possibility of having smart contracts within the HIVE blockchain, many are betting on using the platform to support the economic interaction of their innovations.

Such is the case of bloque64, a newspaper that will use the HIVE blockchain to manage its business logic. If you want to know about the potential of this decision, I invite you to listen to the podcasts of the Cervantes community about it.

Since as a community we keep in touch through a chat on discord, it is not uncommon that @pgarcgo, creator of bloque64, one day commented on the need for a frontend developer for the newspaper. I heard that, I got in touch with him, and here we are, starting a very interesting and certainly absorbing journey.

A route, or roadmap, or whatever you can call it

The idea is to publish posts that indicate the progress we have in the development of the website. They will be checkpoints, where we will see how far we have come. We will discuss some technical things, and where we want to go in the next step.

Now the technical part

The language programming will be typescript, on javascript. And as a framework we will use Vue js, "the progressive framework", with which we will create an environment that can be scaled as the needs of the project change or increase.

The tool that we are going to use

With Vuejs we can mantain the following approach:

Know what state we are in (regarding the Vue packages we are using, the flow of the data logic, the way in which the backend services are accessed, etc.)
Carefully move towards the next goal.
If the step we took was wrong, be ready to go back to the place where there are no mistakes.
Adjust understanding based on what has been learned.
Re-iterate this cycle.

At the same time, we have all the documentation related to Vue and an enthusiastic community that loves the framework.

Phase in which development begins

Vue with its progressive philosophy, by default it's just a little * core * that knows how to render components. But to be able to start in an application like bloque64, we need to add some initial complexity, in order to make more easy future changes.

So I have taken the project code from its repository on github, and added to it what I personally consider to be necessary for successful development:

Typescript: A language that transpiles to javascript, and that allows the use of features seen in more complex languages, such as interfaces, classes, and other tools for object-oriented programming.
Unit-jest: A tool to do unit test in javascript.
Inversify: A library to handle dependency injection.
Vuex: A tool to keep track of the global state of the application.
Nuxt js: A wrapper for Vuejs, bringing the framework closer to projects that need a certain level of complexity, as in our case.

Along with this, the source code uses vue cli (Command Line Interface), in its version 3, which is somewhat different from the previous ones. For now, we are gonna use the hive engine backend service, for things like the token and user managin.

Anyway...

To every decision we make, we always add the quota of uncertainty typical of life. This also applies to innovation and projects that you want to carry out. However, we will do our best to work with agility, and soon have a web page ready for what we want to be bloque64, a newspaper made by the people, for the people.