Developer News: Android Apps on Rust, Astro DB and Storybook 8

Slint, a GUI toolkit based on Rust, supports Android application development with the release of Slint version 1.5 on Thursday.

The GUI toolkit allows JavaScript, C++, or Rust developers to create native user interfaces for embedded and desktop applications. For embedded developers, who prefer to use the Android BSP instead of an embedded Linux distribution, the Slint on Android plugin enables the development and deployment of Slint applications on embedded Android.

It also now has improved live preview for faster replay.

Finally, the company is developing an API so Python developers can use Slint. It’s currently in alpha, but Slint is asking users to experiment with it and provide feedback on it.

Astro adds a managed database

Web framework Astro released Astro Database on Tuesday. It’s an SQL database that Astro boasts is a fully managed database for Astro “that’s fast, lightweight and ridiculously easy to use.”

Astro is focused on building content-driven websites, explained Matthew Phillips, the team’s platform manager. Its inspiration was WordPress, which offers a built-in database—something the Astro team knew they wanted to add as well.

“You’re not just managing your article content, you’re managing data, pages, blocks, images and an entire ecosystem of plugins,” he said.

However, there were obstacles to their plan, he said.

“We made a prototype of the idea, but we encountered several blockers. SQLite is a C library, so it needs native plugins to work in Node.js,” he wrote. “This is fine for local development, but native plugins are difficult to deploy to serverless hosts and startup times were a concern. Plus, key environments like StackBlitz wouldn’t be able to run it fully.”

Enter libSQL, a solution created by Turso that is a fork of SQLite. “It introduces a collection of runtime improvements while maintaining compatibility with classic SQLite,” Phillips wrote. “libSQL represents a modern database client for JavaScript/TypeScript that has avoided the native bindings and compilation steps that plagued the rest of the ecosystem. You could even run StackBlitz through WASM.”

Astro has partnered with Turbo to host libSQL databases.

“Their commitment to a database-per-tenant model was a perfect fit for our need to run hundreds of thousands of databases, all on demand,” he added.

Astro DB provides a fully local libSQL database as soon as the development server is started. It will automatically:

• Create an empty database at .astro/data.db
• Read your schema from db/config.ts
• Seed the database from db/seed.ts

Storybook 8 adds support for React Server components

Storybook 8 released last Friday with support for React Server Components (RSC). Support for RSC is one of the most popular GitHub requests the company has received, said product manager Michael Shilman.

“Storybook 8 heeds your call and introduces our first experimental support for React Server Components,” Shilman wrote. “We classify our RSC solution as experimental because it is only compatible with Next.js – for now. We will continue to develop this functionality through future releases.”

This update also includes significant improvements to the user interface tools’ testing and documentation feature sets “while strengthening framework compatibility and user experience across React, Vue, Angular, Web Components, Svelte, and more.”

Storybook is a frontend workshop for creating user interface components and pages in isolation. Integrates with all major JavaScript frameworks.

Another big improvement in this release is a new visual test plugin that helps developers identify UI bugs more easily.

“The addon brings Chromatic, a visual testing cloud service developed by Storybook maintainers, to Storybook for the first time,” noted Shilman.

This release also includes major autogeneration control improvements for React and Vue projects and restructured support for the Vita, including support for the Vita 5, he added.

“Today, Vita accounts for almost half of all new Storybook projects. Accordingly, we have continued to tighten and refine our Vita integration,” said Shilman.

Finally, Storybook completely redesigned its mobile user interface so that the navigation sidebar and widgets panel “pop out” from the bottom of the page, making them easy to activate on a phone.

New forms of the AI ​​Developer Alliance

The AI ​​Developer Alliance, led by artificial intelligence development company Clarifai, was launched on Thursday. Its goal is to bring together developers and organizations to collaborate and share best practices, ethics and AI knowledge.

Clarifia is an AI, large-scale language model, and computer vision production platform for modeling unstructured image, video, text, and audio data.

So far the Alliance includes Postman, Coder, DBT Labs, LlamaIndex, DSPy, Deepgram, Weaviate, LangChain, New York University, Cleanlab, Tabnine, Sieve Data, Brev.dev, Cast AI, Ikigai, Last9 and YCurb. Clarifai will serve as the alliance’s administrative assistant.