I'd like to open a discussion about switching to a new date picker library in the Metron Alerts UI regarding to the following:
https://lists.apache.org/thread.html/2e4fafa4256ce14ebcd4433420974e24962884204418ade51f0e3bfb@%3Cdev.metron.apache.org%3E https://github.com/apache/metron/pull/1219#discussion_r223733562 A week ago, I opened a PR about removing moment.js from the code base to decrease the size of the production javascript bundle. I could achieve 15% loss in the final bundle size which is admittedly not a game changer but still. Not to mention if we want to heavily rely on date manipulator functions in the future it's better to get rid of it at this early stage. Go here <https://github.com/apache/metron/pull/1219> to read more about the background and the results. I tried to provide as many details as I could. So far, so good. But then I stumbled upon an obstacle, Pikaday <https://github.com/dbushell/Pikaday>. Before going further, let me thank Tibor Meller, Michael Miklavcic and Nicholas Allen for taking their time to go through my proposal to deal with the aforementioned issue. At the end, we agreed on basically not going with my temporary solution that intended to solve the related problems of Pikaday and we'd rather like to find and change for a better alternative. To be fair, Pikaday is a pretty good date picker module, its only problem is the moment dependency if it's installed via npm. But other than that, it functions perfectly. Zero dependencies, small, etc. Long story short, it's good for us unless we want to get rid of moment.js. Before making a decision on what's next, I'd to ask you a question. Is it really a priority and is it really worth the effort to touch our currently used date picker component to get ~15% reduction in the bundle size by removing moment? I'm asking it because if we want to do so, considering that it's a huge topic, the following questions might come up: *A: What component do we want to use instead of Pikaday?* I'm not satisfied with the alternative individual solutions out there on npm. I'd rather pick a component library like the angular port of Bootstrap <https://ng-bootstrap.github.io/#/home> or the angular material library <https://material.angular.io/>. Both of them have a date picker component and many other components to rely on and reuse throughout the Metron app. *B: What component library do we want to use?* Introducing a new component library requires a lot of research and there are many things we have to agreed on. Since it's a long term plan because it would be great to use it consistently instead of picking a new one a few months later just because we chose wrongly. *C: What about the jQuery version of Bootstrap?* So basically we already have a component library and we still use it but we're also planning to replace it with another or the angular port at least to get the most out of the angular rendering engine. Since it uses jquery, it's much less performant than a port written in Angular. And I think it's a bad idea to introduce a new one and use multiple component libraries within one project. We can also pick the date picker component from the jQuery Bootstrap but, again, it's not as efficient as the angular port so it seems to be beneficial to replace it with something else. What do you think, guys? Thanks, Tamas
