[Suggestion] Create NEAR template with preconfigured WalletSelector + SocialDB on live deploy service like Glitch/Replit/Stackblitz

[mpeterdev]

BOS is commonly used for hackathons. We would like to have another option to point developers towards which gives them the same benefits of building on BOS without the security and capability limitations of BOS

Goals:

• no setup or local environment required
• Wallet Selector and SocialDB available out of the box
• ability to share experience publicly without deploying to a hosting provider

In the bos-web-engine repo, we have packages for a prebuilt WalletSelector UI which is very similar to the BOS header dropdown, and we have a library for interacting with SocialDB which even has a more ergonomic hooks interface.

If we provide a Glitch/Replit/Stackblitz template which bundles these things and a developer can spin it up then immediately start writing React code for their hackathon project (including npm deps), does that supersede the use case of BOS for hackathons?

[frol]

Stackblitz looks exactly right, and I agree that this direction would close the gap, but for that Wallet Selector and NAJ have to have a clean API and I wish we invested in that more. @mpeterdev you seemed to be on it, so once that is done, we can get back to this topic.

[frol]

Also, we may consider evolving jutsu.ai since they are eager to contribute to the ease of fromt-end development on NEAR

[gagdiez]

I like the idea.

Whatever template we create, lets make sure to make it is compatible with existing scaffolding tools and templates.

Otherwise please remember to take on the task of updating all the documentation, scaffolding tools and templates, so people does not have friction when reading the docs or checking other examples

[calebjacob]

Hey @mpeterdev, we're planning on pulling this in for our current sprint. We had some interesting questions raised on our sprint kick-off by @gagdiez. Specifically, we'd love to hear more of your vision for this alternative template and how it differs from create-near-app.

Curious to hear your thoughts for these two goals you raised (also adding my own thoughts):

no setup or local environment required

Maybe I'm just being ignorant here, but I'd imagine developers at a hackathon would have a laptop set up with basic tooling required to spin up create-near-app (eg: Node and NPM)?

ability to share experience publicly without deploying to a hosting provider

Our create-near-app project currently generates a simple Next JS project that should be easy to push to a free Vercel project for others to preview their project in a production environment.

@gagdiez and I just want to make sure we don't fragment or confuse developers. It'd be really helpful to distinguish how creating a StackBlitz template would uniquely serve developers compared to driving them to a consistent location like create-near-app. Feel free to push back and add your thoughts! Thanks!

In the meantime, I'm going to get started on a PR for create-near-app that pulls in our DX improvements for interacting with Social DB and Wallet Selector.

[mpeterdev]

Admittedly I am not the target audience for this since I am familiar with Vercel's quick on-ramp and wouldn't hesitate to do a local init then deploy there.

I would turn the question back to @gagdiez @frol and @thisisjoshford . What do you guys think is the reason for BOS being more utilized for hackathons than create-near-app and a free deploy platform like Vercel?

That mental overhead of that flow seems low to those of us familiar with it, but do developers still find it high enough that it is worth minimizing when faced with the time pressure of a hackathon?

Is it possibly a communication/docs issue where we are not highlighting create-near-app enough and how efficiently it can get your project bootstrapped?