GenieStatic - static website generator for Genie apps

[essenciary]

@vrkansagara @PGimenez Starting a discussion here to collect ideas and specs for the static website generator.

The way I see it:

• we need to leverage Genie's strength. That is, the ability to create dynamic websites of any complexity, using whatever data backends and data access strategies we support. Meaning that we should not focus on, for example, markdown files (this use case is covered by Franklin anyway). But rather, allow any dynamic Genie website to be exported as a static website. Such a website could use dynamic pages based on database data, accessing REST APIs, reading files from the file system, etc.

• these features should be "extra" - so not part of Genie core. We'll provide them via an extra package (ex GenieStatic).

• in terms of API, IMO the most straightforward way is to:

  a) extend/specialize the routes method in Genie.Router so that routes that are meant to be exported as static pages retrieve an extra param: an iterator that lets GenieStatic know how to build the static pages.
  Example: say we have route("/products/:id", ProductsController.get). We would extend this as route("/products/:id", ProductsController.get, SearchLight.all(Product)).

  b) then we add a GenieStatic.build(config...) that goes through Router.routes() and requests all the pages using the provided iterator, and dumps the output in a folder - that's the static website.

PS1 - of course, the logic will become a lot more complex when we have multiple route placeholders, like:
route("/blogs/:blog_id/comments/:comment_id", BlogsCommentsController.get). One way to approach this could be
route("/blogs/:blog_id/comments/:comment_id", BlogsCommentsController.get; static = ( (blog_id, comment_id) for blog_id in SearchLight.all(Blog), comment_id in SearchLight.all(Comment, where=["blog_id = ?", blog_id]) ).

PS2 - as a future project, we can build an admin area / CMS for editing "pages".