Hi everyone, Hope you are doing well. I wanted to start a discussion about the AsterixDB dashboard and whether it might be time to rethink it. The current dashboard is Angular-based and has quite a bit of tightly coupled integration with the Maven build. Since most of our team works primarily in Java, needing Angular expertise for even small changes has become a long-term maintainability issue. On top of that, the codebase itself feels dated and likely hasn’t seen much active maintenance in a few years, which could introduce dependency or security concerns as well. It might be worth considering a fresh dashboard that is easier for a Java-heavy team to maintain and integrates more naturally with the Maven lifecycle.
I’ve been experimenting with a small prototype using Vaadin. So far it has been nice to work with mostly Java, fewer files, and much simpler to extend. It also feels very LLM-friendly and easier to maintain than the current setup. The only real concern I see with Vaadin is that it’s server-side rendered, which may be unnecessary for our use case and could be slightly heavy compared to lighter approaches. Because of that, I wanted to open up a broader discussion on direction. Some possible options could be Vaadin, a J2CL-based approach, or even something lightweight like HTMX. The main goal would be long-term maintainability and smooth integration with our existing Java/Maven workflow. This also feels like a good opportunity to improve the overall UX of AsterixDB. Many useful APIs we already have are either undocumented or not easily accessible from a UI, which makes day-to-day development harder than it should be. A refreshed dashboard could expose things like running requests across the cluster, killing queries via clientContextID, storage stats, feeds, make it easier to deploy and manage UDFs, async queries, multi-statement execution, query profiling, DOT plan rendering, warnings, etc improving Admin observability and Developer experience. I use many of these regularly via APIs and having them visible in one place would be very helpful. Would love to hear your thoughts: Should we consider replacing the current dashboard? Any strong opinions on framework direction? What features would you want in a modern AsterixDB UI? Eventually the UI should also evolve to support upcoming AI-driven features, helping developers write better queries and explore plans without constantly switching tabs to ChatGPT… assuming developers are actually the ones using the dashboard xD Hoping this thread can also serve as a place to collect ideas and improve the overall developer/admin/user experience around AsterixDB. Best, Suryaa
