Welcome to Graffiticode

Graffiticode is a tool for programming web components and apis through task specific languages. It is first and foremost a collection of end-user programming languages with runtimes that are React components and GraphQL services.

By end-user we don't mean non-technical, but rather the consumer of the thing being programmed. Just as accountants are the end-users of the spreadsheets they create to do work for their customers, the designers and developers or whoever else are making software with Graffiticode are its end-users.

Getting started

Get started by signing in the Graffiticode using your preferred Ethereum wallet. MetaMask and Coinbase are two of the more popular wallets.

After signing in, you can start building by navigating to the Languages tab, selecting a language, and start writing code.

Main ideas

Graffiticode is a language-oriented programming tool. At the core of every component and api is a task-oriented language that is used to customize its feel and function. On the frontend, code defines the initial state of React components. On the backend, code defines how data is transformed by GraphQL services.

Framed using MVC ideas, you can think of the language as an abstract model, the frontend as the view, and the integration between them as the controller. Without specifying an implementation, the language defines an infinite class of models that is selected from by code in that language.

Languages. Thinking of language as an abstract model that is made concrete by code helps to illuminate the power of the language-oriented programming paradigm. It allows us to create meta-models for a class of models that are selected from later in the development process. It also makes model building more accessible to the non-developers who are often more proximate the problem spaces for which the models are being created.

Tasks. The components and apis are programmed with the Tasks editor. Once programmed, the static state of the component or api is used to initialize them whereever and however they may be hosted.

Compiles. Code and data are compiled to data by being posted to a language service. Compiles are idemponent and thus yield the same output given the same input. This allows us to identify and cache the output of compiles by a hash for their task language and code and data. The Compiles tab shows the cached compiles performed through the Graffiticode Console and API Gateway.

Hosting

React components are installed using your chosen npm package installer. GraphQL services are either self-hosted or managed by an hosting provider such as Graffiticode.