Elm Loves Headless Drupal

Part of my job is to get my hands dirty with technologies I stumble upon. I’ve decided to have a go at React. Well, one thing led to the other and it seems I went down the client side rabbit hole. I’d like to share with you my path - watch out though, it’s a slippery slope.

It all started with this Thinking Flux video which explains the problems Facebook faced in its front-end and the new application architecture they are now using.

Since the Flux concept was out, different libraries were written implementing it, but in my view it seems that Redux is the winner in terms of simplicity, popularity, docs and community. I really recommend going over it - at least the intro and basics. You might be tempted to actually learn a bit of React (tutorial) to follow the examples more easily.

Then I saw Redux was crediting Elm for some of its inspiration, so I decided to give it a quick look. I was immediately blown away by Elm. The syntax is weird (unless you know Haskell), it has a crazy learning curve, but a lot of it makes so much sense.

The following recording is a presentation I first gave internally for Gizra devs, then as a BoF in DrupalCon Barcelona, and finally recorded to share it with everyone.

My goal is to get more people excited about Elm so the community and contributions grows. I feel it is now very much like Drupal about 10 years ago - a small community, far from being mainstream, but with a lot of potential.

Maybe if we’ll draw from Drupal’s experience in building and cultivating a community we’ll be able to bring this awesome tool closer to the mainstream.