Painless live Demos

Sun, May 29, 2016

Demos are essential for any project these days:

There are two main options:

GitHub Pages

are great, but a lot of work. They need to be designed, which may not be a programmer’s strong suit. Pages need to be maintained and pushed or grow stale. Finally, they are not live code.

Fiddle Sites

Sites like JSBin, JSFiddle, let users edit and preview code - seeing results in real time. They are minimal and code-centric.

Downsides: they are disconnected from the repo. Hard to maintain, and easily grow stale.

JSFiddle + Github

JSFiddle can read demos from Github. I first saw this with Matt Ruby’s MobX examples.

JSFiddle+Github === live editable demos with minimal effort. Code is maintained in Github with the main project. Code is always fresh, and the URL leads back to the Github project.

Multiple examples can live in subdirectories in the same repo, each a live playground for users to explore: