I’ve been plugging away at the ARES Catalog project. After negotiating some clearer requirements, I set out building a prototype with Next.JS.

For the database, I started out with Postgres using the Prisma library. I experimented at first with writing my own Next.JS server-side API, then using Next-CRUD to generate the API. Ultimately, I abandoned this whole line of development because I realized that Postgres was costing me too much money for a scale-to-zero project. Since then, I switched the Next.JS app to use MongoDB via the Mongoose library.

The app’s core functionality has been coming along. I’ve imported the ICS 217s from Ben’s spreadsheets into the database and can display those, both in nice web tables as well as a printable view that closely matches the printed forms. Still, I can’t help but feel like my progress has been much slower trying to learn React than if I’d stayed in my comfort zone with Angular. React just hasn’t “clicked” for me yet.