Can I use the tabulator component in kobweb?

[JohnLCaron]

Im looking at various kotlin-based full-stack web frameworks, yours seems compelling. Im also looking at the tabulator JS widget (https://tabulator.info/), which looks like it would give me a lot of what I need in the UI.

Before I jump into kobweb, Im wondering if theres any problem using tabulator with kobweb?

Thanks for any insights....

[bitspittle]

Yes, you should be able to use any JS library in a Kotlin/JS project.

I can't guarantee it will be trivial -- this is a feature that is both awesome and underdocumented -- but start here.

If you run kobweb create examples/opengl you can see very very minimal bindings there that I wrote to wrap three.js.

And if you watch this talk, I use a popular JS library for the slides called reveal.js. I recall it took a bunch of trial and error to get something that worked, but in the end the code needed for it wasn't that much:

• Code bindings
• Build script stuff

If I were you, what I would try to do first is add an npm dependency to your build script (https://tabulator.info/docs/6.3/install#sources-npm) and then the tricky part will be to identify what parts of their API you will need (at least you will need the Tabulator constructor...) and see if you can instantiate one and then log that you did that to the console.

Apologies again as JB should really have written a book for this stuff by now but I think we're still early days in the world of Kotlin web.

[JohnLCaron]

Thanks for the pointers. Do you think it would be worth studying the code from KVision? eg

https://github.com/rjaros/kvision/blob/master/kvision-modules/kvision-tabulator/src/jsMain/kotlin/io/kvision/tabulator/Tabulator.kt

[bitspittle]

That's great code to learn from! Check out https://github.com/rjaros/kvision/blob/de26370b52a009b1b270c5ac0ecd2382b99c8d7e/kvision-modules/kvision-tabulator/src/jsMain/kotlin/io/kvision/tabulator/js/Tabulator.kt which is the JS bindings. Robert then wrapped it with a more Kotlin -idiomatic class, which you linked to.

You'll know you're looking at JS bindings when you see the external keyword.

[JohnLCaron]

I see you are pointing me to https://kotlinlang.org/docs/wasm-js-interop.html in the WebAssembly section of the doc. I thought kobweb used Kotlin/JS? Did you mean https://kotlinlang.org/docs/js-interop.html ?

[bitspittle]

Sorry, a mistake. I didn't even realize they have two copies of that page now. I meant https://kotlinlang.org/docs/js-interop.html