🧭 HixStyle - Roadmap

One of HIX's characteristics is the ability for anyone to create a personalized server, defining its routes, configurations, functions, middlewares, processes,... essentially everything that a web application has, all integrated.

Another way is to configure it in HixStyle mode, following its own pattern, and one of the advantages it offers is being able to configure a standard HIX server so that it adapts to an entire application via data-driven configuration.

HixStyle allows different ways to shape your entire application. As we've seen in previous chapters, it has its own architecture and structure to offer a common system for everyone. One of these features is the ability to define different functionalities from configuration files.

Config

At the root of your project you'll have a config.json file where you'll set the main parameters that will configure your application: Harbour sets, ddriver, database configurations, different keys (session, jwt, csrf,...).

loaders

loaders are the functions that you want to preload in HIX to use them from your application. Within the folder structure that you define when using HixStyle, if you have a /loaders folder, HIX will load all the *.prg files you have in it when you start the server. The server will compile and add to its internal symbol map the functions you've defined.

If any module encounters an error during compilation and/or loading, HIX will not start.

middlewares

Middlewares, like loaders, will be located in their /middlewares folder, and unlike the loaders folder, there will be a config.json file that indicates which files in the folder will be loaded and how each middleware will be configured. In the help section this is well defined.

routes

Routes can be defined in JSON files that will be located in the /routes folder. You can have routes in a single file or split into several. When HIX starts, it will read all the JSON files from the /routes folder and initialize the server.

Getting ready for AI

What advantage does this configuration system offer?

One of the advantages it offers is that, starting from a server you have, whether your own or from a third party, the server will already be prepared, tested, and you'll only need to map how you want it to work without needing to recompile the server.

On the other hand, and perhaps one of the most important, we're trying to design a tool through which any AI can help us in the purpose of designing our app using HIX.

The AI will be able to start the server, stop it, modify the different configuration files, re-read and reload routes via API against the server, remove some route, add some functionality, without the need to recompile our server. This is the objective in the next revision of HIX.

The creation of different /skills and /commands that allow us to advance in this direction is the main objective.