Telar | David Bartol - Desarrollador & Product Builder

🧠 The Idea

Telar was born out of frustration with modern web development.

To build a simple app today, you need to choose from dozens of frameworks, configure webpack, write JSX, manage dependencies… all before you’ve solved the real problem.

The hypothesis: what if you could describe what you want in Spanish, and the compiler made all the technical decisions for you?

🚀 What It Does

aplicación MiTienda
  dominio "https://mitienda.com"

diseño principal
  navbar
    título "MiTienda"

página inicio en "/"
  título "Bienvenido"
  mostrar Producto recientes
    máximo 8
    ordenados por precio
    si falla
      mostrar "Sin conexión"
      reintentar en 5 segundos

página producto en "/producto/(id)"
  diseño principal
  mostrar Producto filtrados por id = parametro.id

  variable cantidad = 1
  texto cantidad
  botón "+" hacer sumar cantidad
  botón "Añadir al carrito" hacer añadirAlCarrito

It automatically compiles into semantic HTML, responsive CSS and optimised JavaScript. The quantity selector on the second page is interactive — it increments right in the browser on click — without writing a single line of JS.

Declarative syntax in structured Spanish
Reusable layouts and components shared across pages
Dynamic routes (/producto/(id)) resolved in real time, not as static files
Variables and local state — real interactivity with zero JavaScript
Forms with native HTML5 validation (requerido, mínimo, máximo)
Dark/light themes, toggleable live and persisted between visits
Automatic SEO: og:tags, sitemap.xml and robots.txt with no configuration
Mobile optimisation, caching and ARIA accessibility by default
Error messages in Spanish with visual context
Full CLI: compile, serve, check, new
Package manager with official packages
Live reload on the development server
Official extension for VS Code
Automated releases: a single git tag triggers tests, build, npm publish and a GitHub release — nothing done by hand

🏗️ Compiler Architecture

Telar implements a full three-phase compiler:

Lexer — tokenises the .telar file, recognising Spanish text with accents and the letter ‘ñ’
Parser — constructs the abstract syntax tree (AST) from the tokens
Generator — traverses the AST and produces semantic HTML + responsive CSS, plus its own JS runtime for state, validation and dynamic routes

Each phase has its own error system with messages in Spanish and specific suggestions on how to resolve them, including visual context from the lines in the file.

📦 Ecosystem

Telar has its own package manager based on GitHub:

telar nuevo mi-proyecto
telar añadir navbar
telar añadir formulario
telar añadir lista
telar servir app.telar

Packages are GitHub repositories prefixed with telar-. Anyone can create and publish packages for the community.

📊 What’s Interesting About the Project

The most challenging part wasn’t generating the HTML, but rather:

Designing a grammar that reads like natural Spanish but is deterministic
Handling the ambiguity of human language without losing precision
Building useful error messages with visual context of line and column
Implementing a significant indentation system compatible with the parser
Creating a package manager without its own infrastructure using GitHub as a registry
Adding state and reactivity in the browser without introducing a framework — a button that increments a variable and updates the screen, generated from a single declarative line

The main challenge was finding the balance between human readability and compiler precision — too free and the compiler is ambiguous, too strict and it loses the naturalness of Spanish.

An equally important part has been testing discipline: every new feature gets actually compiled and verified before it’s considered done, which has surfaced several real bugs that had been sitting silently unnoticed for a while.

🎯 Current Status

Telar is at v0.15, with a complete compiler, CLI, package manager, VS Code extension, reusable layouts and components, dynamic routes, variables and local state, form validation, visual themes, automatic SEO, and a fully automated release pipeline — a single git tag triggers tests, build, npm publish and a GitHub release. 181 automated tests cover the compiler and the CLI.

v1.0 will be the public launch, with the syntax already stable.

📦 Installation

npm install -g @davidbc01/telar
telar nuevo mi-proyecto
cd mi-proyecto
telar servir app.telar