Roadmap

To be honest, we’d be hoodwinking you if we pretended for a second that we had any idea where this project was going in the long run. We’ve changed tack several times now, from being a pure JavaScript library to having a full-blown builder interface; so please take this with more than just a grain of salt. If you’re interested in where the project is going in the mid-term, please be invited to talk to the team, we’ll gladly share our secret plans.

There are, however, a couple of things we feel strongly about, which we’ve tried to capture here (again, to questionable success).


Release schedule

The library aims for biannual major releases in a tick-tock pattern. The summer release will be allowed to break backward compatibility if necessary, but the API should remain stable for the remainder of the year, though features may be added. This is very similar to the concept of semantic versioning.


Philosophy and Scope

Many small decisions have to be made when building a library like this, and from time to time, on idle evenings, the urge makes itself known to imagine that some grand underlying principles governed its design. At other times, when thoughts go in circles over some minute detail, obsessing over some minor detail, one dreams of having guidelines that might inform API structure.

This section is an attempt at distilling principles for the design of the library, to serve as a benchmark and discussion tool for the interested, and for its developers. It is the result of both pathological grandiosity and rumination, and should not be taken too seriously: Pragmatism will always dominate the following ideas, and quite likely they will have to revised sooner or later, when we discover that our thinking has changed.

Built as a tool for teaching

lab.js is built for researchers with broad experience in programming experiments as much as it is built for novices to programming. This necessitates maximum possible conceptual clarity. Interfaces and terminology should be as consistent as possible throughout the library.

The original author’s courses in experimental design and programming are half practical, geared toward enabling students to build and run experiments, and half technical, intended to convey at least the most basic programming concepts. Therefore, the library should be representative of general programming practices, and avoid custom notation that might seem simpler at first, but would limit generalizability of the acquired knowledge.

Limited in scope

The central technical goal of the library is to provide a framework for handling the temporal progression of events over the course of a computer-based experiment that is run in the browser as a single-page application. It also offers helpers for working with the collected data.

The generation and sequencing of stimuli themselves should be left to the user, or external libraries. A GaborScreen, or anything similarly specific, would be out of scope, and should be provided as a third-party-addon.

That being said, the project’s design should make possible the reuse and sharing of parts of studies, so that they can be easily incorporated into new research.

Based on web standards

Technical decisions are made on the assumption that the era of great differences between web browsers is over, and that future browsers will be updated at a steady pace to follow common standards. Antiquated browsers should not be a reason to compromise on features or performance. We have been reluctant to incorporate experimental features unique to any particular browser, but if a particular feature is slated for standardization, using a polyfill for the time being is fine.