Using SimpleBar with IDOM

[Archmonger]

I am trying to import simplebar, but it appears to prevent the component from registering properly.

simplebar_react = idom.web.module_from_template(
    "react", "simplebar-react", resolve_exports=True
)
simplebar = idom.web.export(simplebar_react, "SimpleBar")

Any advice?

[rmorshea]

So imports of the form import thing from "thing"; are using the default export of a module. This requires the, as yet unreleased, exports_default parameter for module_from_template.

[rmorshea]

IDOM actually used to do this, but using NPM in this way adds a bunch of complexity:

• Users now have to worry about installing NPM
• You also require users to perform some sort of build step to turn code that's probably CJS into ESM modules
• Now there's a whole JS build system you have to maintain.
• What happens if third party Python packages call module_from_template with a conflicting version of a package?
• How do third party Python packages declare that they require a build step?

Fortunately or unfortunately, relying on CDNs is just way simpler.

[Archmonger]

Well then it seems like the most robust solution would be essentially mimicking NPM's behavior in module_from_template. Compiling everything into a single JS bundle (which is how I'm assuming NPM operates) makes a lot more sense then trying to poke around CDN endpoints to find a specific filename.

Bundling in Python would not only allow us to do it at run-time, but also would also play really well into creating predetermined Django static files.

Someone must've tried to do this in the past... I'll try to hunt for a python package that we might be able to use as inspiration.

[rmorshea]

So NPM is just a package manager. It doesn't create JS bundles. There are various bundlers like Rollup and Webpack that are beasts unto themselves that you have to use to do that (I use Rollup in the widget repo template).

Perhaps IDOM could provide some independent utilities for creating these bundles similar to the way jupyter-packaging does, but I'm hesitant to reintroduce NPM to IDOM like this again.

[Archmonger]

Similar idea to webpack but one bundle per node package, rather than a master bundle.

Thinking about it now, this might not even be needed. From IDOM's side of things, it would be just as effective to construct all possible JS modules from a react template within module_from_template, then create a dictionary mapping of these.

Would allow the export syntax to operate as I mentioned above.

Let me know your thoughts on both of these options.

[rmorshea]

That's almost identical to what IDOM used to do. This idea of turning each dependency into a bundle is something that Snowpack does.

We could make this sort of thing a separate tool, but I don't think I'm going to build it into the core of IDOM.