Front End Research Notes
Front end has to do with
- Development — what modularity system do we want to use to enable more cross-talk and sharing?
- Deployment — after you make your app how do we make it as seamless/zero commands as possible to send it up to the web?
- Testing — how do we start to integrate unit testing and other testing frameworks into the UI of our experiments so they are more reliable?
- Configuration — how do we configure each experiment to customize it’s global settings
- Code version linking: all data records from an experiment should record which version of a code base was run (e.g., github commit hash) for replicability/bug tracking
- Recruitment — how do we make it possible to recruit and run with any arbitrary recruitment platform including Mechanical Turk, Prolific, a custom citizen-science type page, Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Google ads, etc…
Possibilities:
- Custom javascript (ala psiturk.js)
- raw jQuery
- d3.js
- jsPsych
- Vue
- React
- Angular, etc…
- gaming libraries like Phaser (pam!), Unity (Ili! Guy!), etc…
- something else?
One comment about frontend: It is likely that in 1-5 years python will become a more viable front end language due to recent advances in WebAssembly possibly leading to a shift away from Javascript. However, Javascript is so big that will be a slow evolution and so I’m still comfortable with going Javascript here.