One of the design goals of SQL Frames is to make integrated UI components that are able to leverage the underlying DataFrame data model. Charts is considered as a key UI component for visualizing the data stored in the DataFrames. While evaluating to pick the right charting library one clearly stood out. It is Apache ECharts.

SQL Frames has several goals in terms of how it is distributed. As a library that can run within the browser or in the backend using Node or within an electronjs app. In addition, it should also be delivered as esm module or umd and cjs modules. Initially much of this bundling was managed with Rollup. In the initial stages when the entire codebase was in pure JavaScript the build time was around 2 seconds. Moving to TypeScript increased it to around 9 to 10 seconds when targeted to ESNext and almost double when targeted to older ES standards. This was simply killing productivity which was unacceptable. Yarn workspaces and esbuild is how this has been solved.

SQL Frames has several types of DataFrames that neatly fit into a class hierarchy as expressed in TypeScript. One of the goals of SQL Frames, which makes it different from current Python Pandas, is an integrated user interface to all the different DataFrames. There are two main reasons for this.

I will be posting a series of Thank you <techstack-component> posts to thank some of the important technologies used in building SQL Frames starting with this one about TypeScript.

Building a major framework with the goal to make it easy to use, by as many as possible and to solve as many use cases as possible, the choice of the programming language can potentially make a huge difference. SQL Frames gladly embraced TypeScript. As this was done mid-way after several thousands of lines of code, it was not a trivial effort. However, it did pay off well.

My son got selected into ACSL finals which happened on 29th May. During the year he managed to get 40 on 40 which I think is awesome. He gave his best for finals as well but didn't manage to get any of the medals. While he was a bit disappointed, I personally think he did great. But is it me the dad saying this or is there some objectivity to this thinking? The good thing is ACSL finals data is publicly available and that immediately got me into thinking about doing some analysis. Here are my findings for the 2020-2021 Junior division.