cat / atlas
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an offline map explorer where each world, from a game map to a city's open data, ships as one .atlas file

feat/atlas-next-horizon
atlas / docs / decisions / 0002-allons-is-removed.md
0002-allons-is-removed.md 2.2K source

2. allons is removed, and nothing replaces it

  • Date: 2026-08-02
  • Status: accepted
  • Where it is written down: issue #5 §1, §3.4, §10 decision 1

Context

The pre-rewrite desktop application is built on allons, a framework of its own carried as a module dependency. Before the rewrite was decided, what the application actually consumes from its host was measured: one event subscription and one file dialog. Everything else the framework offered was either unused or a wrapper around something the standard library or Wails already exposes.

Decision

allons is removed entirely. The desktop host becomes roughly 150 lines at the module root: wails.Run with the application handler as the asset server, an fs.Sub static mount for the seam bundle, and the native file dialog behind Hostenv.PickFile. The event subscription becomes SSE on GET /events — a server-sent stream of ready-to-swap partials — so no Wails runtime JavaScript is needed in the page at all.

No framework replaces it. The gap it filled is now a named interface (see ADR 7) rather than a dependency.

Consequences

  • The host contract shrinks to three methods, which is what makes three different hosts plausible rather than aspirational.
  • The page has no framework runtime of its own: what the browser loads is the vendored hypermedia runtime and, when present, the seam's one bundle.
  • The Wails host was a later wave of this rewrite; until it landed at close-out, atlas serve was the only host and PickFile answered ErrNotAvailable. The application was fully functional under it, which was the point.
  • github.com/FelineStateMachine/allons left go.mod when the old tree was archived, not before — the reference implementation needed it to run as the oracle. It went with the tree, along with the transitive SQLite and BLAKE3 dependencies it brought.

What it actually cost

The host came in at 162 lines of main.go, 122 of redirects.go and 83 of hostenv/wailshost. redirects.go is the estimate's one surprise and none of it is framework: a webview scheme task cannot express a redirect, so the host walks the application's own doorways itself (docs/app.md §1.4).