#robotjs

It’s been a while! I’ve been heads down focusing on other projects, and currently I don’t have a project that needs RobotJS in my day-to-day. I still very much believe in this project, and more importantly I believe it needs to exist. For this reason, I’d like to propose an alternative method for maintaining this project. 

My focus in the past few years has shifted towards blockchain technology. I’ve always hated how centralized and closed open source communities were. To contribute to a project you have to track the owner down, convince them that your code is worthy, and most of the time that code ends up sitting there and getting stale because the owner is off doing other things. This sucks and RobotJS isn’t the only project that has this issue. With one of the largest open source projects, WordPress, this problem is out of control.

Another issue is the time it takes to onboard new team members. For me, I’ll spend some time finding a new collaborator, onboard them, they’ll be active for a few weeks or months, then move on. I don’t blame them because I do the same thing. So I’ve been looking for a way to empower the community to onboard new members and to take ownership of the project has a whole. 

Decentralized Autonomous Organization

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs are a very exciting and new field in computer science. The idea is pretty simple: You implement your business logic as code, and let a program enforce it. 

Now how do you verify that the code and its execution is doing what you expect? You run it on an open source computer or CPU, and this is what Ethereum enables. Ethereum lets users implement programs using a special language, then you can run your program on a distributed, decentralized, open source computer. In my eyes this is the only way to accomplish this. 

RobotDAO

So that was a lot to get through, I’m sorry! This is what I’m working on now for the MVP of the RobotDAO:

A simple interface for proposing new project collaborators. 

An interface to allow voting this new member in.

The Ethereum smart contract that takes votes and manages users reputations. Currently I’m building this using Thetta, but I’m also looking at DAOStack and district0x.

A program that can react to a new member proposal getting approved and make the change on Github. In blockchain terms this is called an Oracle and I’m making the changes using Terraform.

Users will vote using reputation, something that has zero value outside of this project. Reputation will be handed out for free to users that contribute to the project. 

I’ve been taking part in DAO’s for years now and I’ve seen how they can change and empower communities. I hope the RobotJS community will be open to this idea.

For this release of RobotJS I focused a bit on the continuous integration/delivery pipeline.

From the start of this project I knew it would be difficult to test. How do you test a UI automation tool? With a UI! For this release I integrated a tool I built called Target Practice. Target Practice is an Electron app with a couple of buttons and inputs that feeds all events out over stdout. This allows us to write cross platform tests for RobotJS that actually confirm if a button was clicked, if text was typed, and much more! This with the new automated pre-built binaries should make it much easier to release new versions.

Support Unicode Characters for .typeString(). #276

Fix Windows scrolling bug. #361

Fix createStringForKey failure on Mac OS for non-Latin languages. #294

Waiting for event queue to be processed before returning from the methods. #363

Unified the horizontal scroll direction for each OS. This is something that Target Practice caught and is technically a breaking change for Windows. #371

It’s been a while since the last RobotJS release, I apologize for this. It’s hard for me to invest a bunch of time on projects that I don’t actively rely on anymore. That said there’s a bunch of great PRs that need to be reviewed, tested, merged, then deployed. 

Currently it’s very difficult for me to do all of this because it all has to be done manually. This involves spinning up 32 and 64bit versions of Windows and Linux to test then pre-build the binaries for release. This takes a couple of hours for each release. The automated tests we have just test the API mostly, and make sure that nothing throws an error. What we don’t test currently is what RobotJS actually does, like mouse clicks and scrolls. Having a real automated test suite would allow me to confidently merge release PRs much quicker. I started a project to help with this though, more on that here: 

https://github.com/octalmage/targetpractice

I spent the week building a site for RobotJS,  https://robotjs.io. This site is hosted on GitHub Pages, and it’s built using Jekyll. Like the GitHub wiki, pages are built using markdown. Just commit a change and the site will be rebuilt and published!

Add support for F13-F24. #214

Add a way to specify the X11 display in Linux. #206

Add typescript declaration file. #225

Fix screen capture for Mac. #242

Special thanks to @jub3i, @illegalprime, and @tristanlievens!

Add support for right shift. #205

Migrate to SendInput from mouse_event on Windows. #181

Continuous integration for Mac. #199

Support for numpad keycodes 0-9. #200

Special thanks to Deltatiger!

Added insert key. #185

Updated to nan 2.2.1 to support Node.js v6. 54c65c3

Use prebuild for installing binaries. #187

Special thanks to @chaosprinz!