Big News: Altoviso Releases Backdraft v2.x

We have released a new version of Backdraft--a JavaScript library for building browser-hosted user interfaces. This library is the result of several years of private evolution in commercial projects.

• employs a familiar, frugal, and powerful API that includes declarative composition as well as traditional type specialization
• small--about 1000 lines of pure, modern JavaScript
• faster than almost all and as fast as any component-construction library
• no compilation step required
• zero external dependencies in the library code
• FreeBSD licensed
• Commercial support available from Altoviso

Projects

ALTOVISO releases open source software under the Backdraft mark. First described in the book Mastering Dojo (2008), Backdraft 1.x was a prototype/reference framework for the browser-compute design model. The original framework included many features and capabilities that were novel at the time but are now considered state-of-the-art (for example, declarative composition).

Some of the v1.x Backdraft machinery was moved to the Dojo library and is in wide use to this day. The Dojo 1.x loader and builder were both taken from Backdraft and most of the code in those components is still the original Backdraft code. The Dojo v2.x loader started life as a space-optimized edition of bd-load.

We've developed a new version of bd-load that represents a state-of-the-art AMD loader which blows the doors off competing offerings. We've also recently updated bd-smoke (a test harness) and bd-promise (JS6 promises with extra features).

Other Backdraft machinery was further developed in several private, often client-driven projects. The private 1.x code has diverged from the original code to such an extent that most of the original code is obsolete; we keep an archive of the 1.x code and a rollup for historical purposes.

Recently, we were encouraged by some of our colleagues to release all the advances we've made to Backdraft over the years. The result is Backdraft v2.x.

All projects listed below are authored by ALTOVISO consultants and available under a BSD-style license.

• employs a familiar, frugal, and powerful API that includes declarative composition as well as traditional type specialization
• small--about 1000 lines of pure, modern JavaScript
• faster than almost all and as fast as any component-construction library
• no compilation step required
• zero external dependencies
• Embraces and leverages ES6
• FreeBSD licensed

• Extremely compact--less than 500 lines of code
• Executes on node.js and in the browser
• Algorithms optimized to theoretical minimum time complexity possible
• Includes the features required to construct large applications
• Does not include unnecessary, outdated, and/or naive features present in other loaders
• Embraces and leverages ES6
• zero external dependencies
• FreeBSD licensed

• zero external dependencies
• Executes on node.js and in the browser, with or without AMD
• Executes an arbitrarily deep and wide hierarchy of code fragments
• Executes synchronous and asynchronous code fragments/tests
• Optional before/before-each/after-each/after scaffolding as the hierarchy is traversed
• High-precision timer for performance testing
• Simple command-line/URL switches that cause a subset of fragments to be executed
• Simple extendable and replaceable logging machinery
• Unopinionated assert requirements: anything that throws an exception can be used to show failure
• Exit status for CI support
• All this power yet simple and easy to hack: the complete code stack is less than 650 lines in one file
• FreeBSD licensed