Rock U - Lava - What is Lava

Transcribed Video Content

Alright. So let's talk about what lava is. Now, if you're a lot of people, when you approach lava, you might feel it's this huge beast that's hard, complex, and while it may not come intuitively natural, to you in the first few minutes of seeing it, I think when you walk through it, actually see it's pretty easy and it's pretty approachable and something that for the most part anybody can do it. So let's take a a step through and just kind of look at what where did lava come from and some basic concepts of it, and then we'll move on to into some more advanced topics. The first thing you have to understand when you when you're approaching it, you're gonna have that kind of feeling of uncertainty and there will be times when you do get frustrated. Right? You you're just missing one little piece of syntax and you're gonna get frustrated. And I would just encourage you just push through that the best of us have have have realized that. In fact, what I always try to tell people is that you don't have to be smart to be a programmer, just have to be very patient. And you have to be able to push through these frustrations because basically every programmer reaches this point where you just wanna give up and it's it's success is just kinda pushing through that. So when you hit that wall, just know that's that's natural, push through and you'll make it and when you get to the other side, you'll never make that that specific mistake again, I promise you. And you'll feel, a superhero. Because if you can push through and just learn even some of the basics of lava, don't have to be a lava master. If you just learn the basics of lava, you'll be a superhero for your ministry and you'll be able to do some really amazing things. Because lava is used everywhere. It's used in workflows, it's used on web pages, Wherever there is Rock, you will find Lava. So let's just look at the history of Lava a bit. So Lava came from a technology from Shopify. Shopify is a premier e commerce application that hundreds, thousands of people use this to set their online stores. And so they needed a templating engine to allow people to kind of customize the look of their stores, change the way their products are displayed. And so they came up with a technology called Liquid. And so when we first started with Rock, we basically took the concept of Liquid. They've, really made it extensible and and and people have made versions of of liquid in in several different programming languages. So it's something that Shopify shares, kind of that construct in that in that technology. So we latched on to them. So we started using liquid within Rock. Well, we started extending it in lots of different ways and adding to it in some very specific ways for Rock. And it really got to the point was to the point where it was, yeah, it's it's liquid, but it really is so much more than that. And so we really felt it needed its own name at that point. And so, not to come up with its own name, but we decided, what's what's liquid Rock? And that's that's Lava. So that's how it got it. That's how it Lava got its name. So but it really came from this templating engine from Shopify. Now, so what is is Lava? At its at its pure, it's just really a templating engine. It's a bridge between how something looks and the data that that is powers what what it should look . So, so if you're so whenever you have Lava, you're basically given the data and you basically tell it how to make that data look on the page, or in the workflow. So we take a very simple example of of of, in this case, the data here is that we're giving a variable here called person and that person has several properties, nickname, last name. And then we take this Lava template, this is a very simple Lava template. It's basically saying hello and it's, you see these little, braces and that's where we're gonna basically say take person, that's over here. And we want the nickname, so we put dot nickname and then we put our closed braces. And it's gonna take what's whatever's in this orange and it's gonna put that value in there and so we'll say, hello Ted. Now, this other stuff if you're not familiar with it, it's just HTML. So h one is heading which means make your text big, that's all a heading is. And so h one is the biggest heading. So we're basically just saying, hey, make big text that says hello and then whatever the data says, Ted. And so that's as simple as Lava is. There's a few other, constructs that we'll show you about how you can use some filters and how you can use some different tags. But it's very big basic. It's just taking data and a template and merging the two together.