At MojoTech, we have a long history of working on, contributing to, and using various Open Source software projects. A sample of early projects include Cerberus, one of the first Ruby-based Continuous Integration tools; Capybara-UI, a Capybara abstraction making it easier to define reusable DOM page objects; Mojo-Database, an early Objective-C ORM for SQLite that provided an ActiveRecord-like adapter; MarionetteJS, a popular JavaScript framework built on top of BackboneJS; and Jeet, a CSS grid system.
More recently, we announced the launch of PrismatestJS, a TypeScript project allowing developers to decouple front-end application tests from the view UI implementation, thereby making tests easier to write and maintain.
This month, MojoTech took over ownership and maintenance of the Torch project, and today we'd like to formally announce the official version 2.0 release of the project as well as re-introduce ourselves to the Elixir community.
As a company, we have been using Elixir more and more for both client projects as well as internal applications. As our Elixir workload increases, we continue to develop new libraries for re-use as well as sample and use existing open source projects that fit our needs.
One of the projects that we have used is Torch, billing itself as a "rapid admin generator for Phoenix apps." When first evaluating the costs of developing our own admin interfaces or leveraging an existing open-source project, we reviewed several existing solutions available on hex.pm. For our needs, in the end, Torch provided the best initial set of features and code quality.
One downside to this choice, was the fact that Torch didn't seem to be very actively maintained in recent months, with very little public activity on the project in 2019. We forked a version of the repository on GitHub and began to make modifications and tweaks to the software to suit our needs, while submitting most of the changes back to the original project as Pull Requests.
Over time, other Elixir users began to inquire if the project was still being maintained, and several began using our fork of the project instead of the official repository.
Eventually, the original developer Daniel and the team at InfiniteRed put out a call looking for help in having someone else in the community take over the project and continue to push it forward.
Being users of the software, we saw this as an excellent opportunity to step up and fill this need and take over maintenance of the project.
While there is no definitive roadmap yet for the v3.0 release, our hope is that you will give Torch a look and join us in contributing to its future success.
PS: Do you have an Elixir project in the pipeline? Check out our Elixir development services to learn more about our development engagements.