Cardstack Product Update

Completion of Code Mode 🚀🎇

We are incredibly excited to announce the completion of Code Mode by our development team. This is a significant milestone for our team members, who have been working continuously to add coding aids that make up an Integrated Developer Environment (IDE) directly into the web-based environment.

Code mode allows for:

• Real-time editing of Card code, which allows developers to make changes to the functionality, layout and data structure of any card without going through a git process.
• Allows developers to choose from pre-existing modules that they can reuse to put a field together, or extend using inheritance to make a new specialization.
• It allows developers and power users to see the stored data structure and make changes to it using a familiar file editor. This is like a view source for the card universe, unlike the browser view source, you can actively edit the source code and see the changes reflected immediately.

We built Code Mode so we can create more cards much quicker and build up a card catalog that is complete and usable from day 1. It is also a great educational tool for developers curious about Cardstack for a playground to learn how everything is wired together and make a running app with their own customization within minutes.

Code Mode uses the same module loader infrastructure that we will use for future no code UI where instead of typing the changes in a code editor, users can just point and click and delete them.

Code Mode includes a schema editor that has exactly the same capabilities and we will move those UI components to design mode, which is a no-code version of the same underlying runtime to allow non-developers to get the same experience of building and extending cards entirely in the browser.

With this tool reaching feature complete status, we will be launching a YouTube series hosted by Chris Tse and Luke Melia, our engineering manager, to teach developers how to leverage the Cardstack Framework by walking through the process of building and extending cards using Cardstack tools like Code Mode and interact tool as well as git-based workflows for contribution to the open source project.

📝 Community members who would like to participate are welcome to contribute ideas of what type of use cases of primitive cards or fields you would like us to build during this series. Tag #cardmaker with your ideas.

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