December 2019 Summaries

Sanity Studio now supports environment variables, enhancing continuous integration (CI) capabilities and simplifying the deployment of studios for various projects and datasets from a unified codebase, along with enabling environment-specific customizations. As an open-source editing platform that connects with Sanity's hosted datastore, Sanity Studio allows direct deployment from a local machine, but users often prefer to commit code to git and establish a deployment workflow, a method also favored by Sanity. Users can access the new feature by upgrading their Sanity Studio and referring to the documentation for guidance.

Sanity Studio introduced a new asset source extension inspired by Robin Pyon's work for Love Magazine, which led to a competition for creating innovative asset source plugins. Robin's asset manager, originally developed for Love Magazine, is now publicly available and offers features such as grid and table browser views, image ordering by date and filename, and batch deletion. The competition, which runs until December 8, 2019, encourages participants to create open-source plugins using the new extension point, with winners receiving premium swag. The Sanity team provides resources, including a tutorial and starter code, to aid participants in developing their plugins.

Glush is a new parser toolkit designed to create efficient parsers in multiple languages like JavaScript, Go, and Ruby using a declarative and expressive grammar format. It aims to support a wide range of grammar features with best-in-class performance and was developed as part of an initiative to make the GROQ query language, used for querying JSON data at Sanity.io, open-source. The need for a new parser arose from the limitations of existing tools and the desire to avoid proprietary lock-in while ensuring a human-readable specification that is executable. Glush is built on the principles of Glushkov’s construction algorithm, which allows for recursive rule calls and maintains reliable performance even for complex grammars. Although still a work-in-progress, Glush represents an effort to advance parsing technology by building on decades of computer science research and aims to be adaptable for use across various programming languages and platforms.