Unrolled: Introducing the Pika REPL

Today we launched the new rewrite of pika.dev, which included a new Package REPL for the package view page. This was just announced on Twitter, but I figured I'd unroll and repost the entire thread here quickly for anyone interested.

You can read our entire release thread including all of todays releases here: https://twitter.com/pikapkg/status/1158765492191911936

What's a Package REPL? Keep reading to find out...

Pika 📦

@pikapkg

✨ INTRODUCING: The Pika Package REPL

Test packages directly in the browser, without installing anything locally. Perfect for quickly evaluating packages before bringing them into your important projects.

Try it today: pika.dev/packages/path-…

16:05 PM - 06 Aug 2019

3 7

Pika 📦

@pikapkg

True story: The second we had this feature working, we ended up needing it to quickly test our own site's path parsing logic.

Instead of debugging the entire app, we could quickly iterate on just the code snippet... RIGHT IN THE BROWSER🤘

16:05 PM - 06 Aug 2019

0 0

Pika 📦

@pikapkg

This is powered internally by ristretto: a really neat, modular testing library from the Polymer team.

github.com/PolymerLabs/ri…

16:05 PM - 06 Aug 2019

0 1

PolymerLabs / ristretto

An extensible test runner ☕️

🚨 PROJECT STATUS: EXPERIMENTAL 🚨This product is in the Experimentation phase. Someone on the team thinks it’s an idea worth exploring, but it may not go any further than this. Use at your own risk.

Ristretto

Ristretto is an extensible test runner.

There are several established test runners in the JavaScript ecosystem (Mocha, Jasmine and Jest to name a few of the more prominent ones). Ristretto was created to address a feature sweet spot left unaddressed by incumbent projects.

Ristretto has the following qualities:

Simple, concise, class-based factorization
Consumable as modules with browser-compatible path specifiers OOB
Batteries included for the most popular testing syntaxes (BDD/TDD)
Designed for extensibility (mixins, specialized reporters and a spec-as-data-structure philosophy)
Ships with mixins that enhance specs with powerful features (e.g., fixtures and test isolation)
Authored in TypeScript
No build tooling required to use
"JavaScript is the native language, The Web is the…

View on GitHub

Pika 📦

@pikapkg

Your code snippet is run as a fake ristretto "test", in a sandboxed iframe, directly in the browser. Open up dev tools and you'll see any console output!

16:05 PM - 06 Aug 2019

0 1

Pika 📦

@pikapkg

This is just the start, and we'll keep adding to this over the next few months! Two additions I can't wait for:
1⃣ Package type definitions & type checking
2⃣ Logging output/errors to the page if you're on mobile

16:15 PM - 06 Aug 2019

0 0

BONUS: Curious about how a package works after using it in the REPL?

Pika 📦

@pikapkg

The SOURCE tab is another incredibly useful, but subtle addition: An @unpkg browser built right in to the page.

View any package source without leaving Pika, or click the link at the top to go directly to unpkg.com.

16:36 PM - 06 Aug 2019

0 0