2023-07-27 –, 32-124
Julia is primarily considered to be a "scientific programming language". Quite often, what starts out as "scientific programming" ends up in products meant to be consumed by others. When this happens, these pieces of software end up in "applications", typically with a UI of some sort. This BoF is for those that build these applications, to learn from others, and to discuss what can be done to move the ecosystem forward.
Building applications around a "Julia core" can be done in a variety of ways, hence there are also a variety of solutions. Some applications are shipped "natively", e.g. using GTK.jl, TK.jl, target terminal users, e.g. using Term.jl, or target browser-based environments, e.g. using JSServe.jl, Genie.jl, Pluto.jl, etc. which may in turn end up as "native" applications using Electron.jl.
Even though there is a wide variety of "application targets", most of these packages work in a similar fashion. Said differently, most applications take the form of a Julia process, a process rendering the UI and a means to communicate between the two. A potentially interesting question to try and answer during this BoF is whether there is a need or a desire to arrive at a common base framework to facilitate these types of applications.
We will talk about what people are building, what they are using to build applications around a "Julia
core", how these applications are being deployed, and how we may improve Julia's ecosystem with respect to the challenges faced by these "application builders".
Joris is driven by a need for automation and to make things easier for himself, typically while first making them harder. He has been creating CI processes for Julia (and other languages) for as long as he has been programming in Julia (which has been a while), primarily for GitLab, but also for other platforms such as GitHub and Buildkite. He has also been building web-based Julia applications for the same amount of time, trying to find more efficient ways of building those at every step.
Joris is the technical team lead for the JuliaSim product and applications team.