You’d think people would jump at the chance to avoid JS, especially when Opal is a very well coded and slick little library - so what can we do to get more people interested?
I personally think that showing Opal apps that are out there in the wild will be a huge help…
The #1 way to get developers interested in Opal is to have a newsworthy app use Opal. This could be a killer open source app (such as a CMS as we’ve been talking about built on Volt that can actually compete with WordPress in functionality and “plugability”) or a closed source major app that generates a lot of buzz for Opal.
Sidenote: On the latter we’re actually going out for funding presently for such a project, but it’s going to take some time. On it we’re working on using Volt and Phaser (via opal-phaser).
Perhaps of interest to some here as far as involvement will be on the former. We’re getting started on that in the very near term and hope to get some community interaction.
Having thrown these out as, in my opinion, the major ways, I think that we also need to (and I think that this is critical) make some effort on benchmarking (and showing these benchmarks) and writing up a very strong debugging section on the Opal documentation and some blogs and flaunt them. We keep getting beaten up primarily in these two areas (performance / overhead and debugging).
Additionally, some effort could be given to advocate making Opal a first class citizen in various editors such as RubyMine, etc. Further I think perhaps some things like simply implementing things like alias_native into a YARD pull request could be helpful at raising community awareness. Making some of the more common tools that people use with Ruby can definitely raise eyebrows and thus awareness.
Agree completely @ylluminate
I think the number one thing that will get people’s attention is a killer app. Luckily for Opal, it’s quite possible that Volt will get one soon - which will in turn be excellent for Opal as well as a key voice of confidence.
The other really important thing is docs and other learning material. I think actually we need to start dedicated threads for each of those to see who’s interested in helping out.
Just tried an experiment to see if these guys say anything: Twitter post Re: Macaw Scarlet
I think relatively small efforts like this might be worth a shot as far as reaching out and educating via infiltration.
Yeah, even if they don’t amount to anything, at least they help with getting word out about Opal 