{"id":1992,"date":"2021-01-06T13:08:04","date_gmt":"2021-01-06T11:08:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.albertopassalacqua.com\/?p=1992"},"modified":"2021-01-06T13:08:04","modified_gmt":"2021-01-06T11:08:04","slug":"some-updates-on-my-hobby-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.albertopassalacqua.com\/?p=1992","title":{"rendered":"Some updates on my hobby project"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some time ago I tweeted about working on a web-based UI for our codes (and snappyHexMesh) to facilitate working with students and also to make the process less tedious for me, which does not hurt. I have never done development with web technologies until two years ago: most of my focus has been on implementing numerical algorithms. I have written UI code in the past using GTK and Qt, but I was quite far from anything web-related, aside from basic HTML. Saying the learning curve was steep is an understatement, but with the help of a very good friend (with the patience of a saint \ud83d\ude00 ) I have slowly learned HTML, CSS, Javascript and Typescript. I knew C# already, so the choice of the backend framework was quite obvious: asp.net core<\/a> was maturing, is open source, has very nice tooling, and now also has Blazor<\/a>, a single-page application framework in C#, which relies on WebAssembly to execute code in the browser. It also comes with Entity Framework Core, which helps a great deal in managing database operations from C# code, which is a big plus.<\/p>\r\n

From then, things have evolved and I have written several iterations of the app, while I learned more about the many technologies involved. So, it has become a long personal project, accompanied by a great amount of fun, knowing new people (Blazor has a very nice and fun community, one of most helpful I have met in the open-source world, together with that of Three.js, Babylon.js and openSUSE) and quite some headaches too. It is still a personal project, no code has been published, and the amount of work to reach a release state is large and done in my spare personal time. In any case, it is fun, so I thought of start blogging about it, which also helps me to stay on track.<\/p>\r\n

Application requirements<\/h3>\r\n

Let’s start with a few of the requirements I set forth for the app:<\/p>\r\n

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  1. No specific knowledge of the underlying code should be needed to set up a case. The user should focus on choosing the physics and the numerical methods, rather than on the specificity of the underlying code. We’ll see how well this will be achieved, but this is the intention.<\/li>\r\n
  2. No code will ever be shared between the app and OpenFOAM\u00ae<\/sup>. This means:\r\n