Technologies like React have pushed the boundaries of web applications from each interaction is a separate page to the entire app being in a single page tremendously improving the user experience. These technologies also support server-side rendering making it possible to render the entire markup on the server. This helped to create next generation static site generators that leverage this wonderful Javascript technology and provide highly interactive web sites that are pre-rendered and generated making the entire site static to serve the content which can then become dynamic if needed on the client-side using JavaScript.

This resulted in a design paradigm called JAMSTACK for making websites and docs.

One of the most important visualization techniques is Pivot Tables. They provide side-by-side comparison of data along both rows and columns. And often the columns end up being the time dimension (year, quarter or month). The power of pivot tables is amplified if there are sub-totals and grand-totals along with just the totals. But the question is whether all this can be done with one single SQL query or at least as fewer queries as possible? If a database supports the CUBE group by clause, such as PostgreSQL and Oracle, then this is simple and can be done in a single query. But what about MySQL the other popular database that only supports ROLLUP group by clause?

The success of any software depends partly on its documentation. A good documentation can make or break a great software because people need to know how to use it and in case of a developer facing software, it needs examples and properly documented API. SQL Frames uses TypeScript and a nice API documentation can be generated using the TYPE DOC system. However, to show case all the features and provide a low-code software documentation experience, it needed a good documentation framework. In addition, as SQL Frames runs within the browser, a key requirement is to be able to author documentation with inline live examples.

Building an enterprise grade software requires high level of quality assurance. For quality to increase, it first needs to be measured. In the very early stages of SQL Frames development, the focus was just building and more building of features with a few random code snippets thrown here and there to occasionally make sure nothing is broken. But as the project moved past the simple viable idea to a real project, there was a need to uphold the quality as even more features were being added. After carefully searching for testing frameworks for JavaScript, I have decided to go with JEST.

SQL Frames provides the ability to create calculated fields by writing JavaScript code. I deliberated whether to provide a much simpler formula authoring system like Excel keeping in mind the goal of providing a low-code platform but in the end it was decided to not have any proprietary scripting language that someone has to learn and instead just rely on JavaScript which is already one of the most popular languages. This meant, the need for a simple online IDE that allows authoring JavaScript.