Hi All, I finally took some time a few weeks ago to do more work on the UI framework. I'd hoped to send out an update before going offline for 2 weeks, but...here's the update now instead. :-)
*Background* * * I spent quite a while over the last two years, with help from others, investigating different UI frameworks, and ultimately deciding to build something custom on top of Spring MVC. Many of you saw this during the two 2.x UI sprints we did last year. But a big sticking point was always how we'd get from our current webapp to 2.0, preserving backwards-compatibility of modules, but not requiring us to preserve every bad UI decision we made in the last 7 years. Anyway, a recent conversation with Mike finally got everything to crystalize for me. *UI Framework module* * * I have taken most of the *framework* parts of the 2.x UI work, and packaged them up in a module that runs against the latest 1.8.x, 1.9.x, and trunk. This means that you can start writing modules against this today that give you some awesome features, like: 1. the ability to write views with groovy templates 2. controllers that auto-recompile whenever you change them in development mode* 3. the ability to write "fragments" and easily compose pages out of them I haven't had a chance to update the 2.x documentation pages on the wiki, but if you are really itching to try this out, you can get the code from my https://github.com/djazayeri/openmrs-module-uiframework, and build it with maven 3. You'll also need the latest revisions of one of our release branches, as I needed to make a small change to web.xml. Proper docs should come later this week. * = Will be documented better soon, but basically if you set a JRE argument like the following, then that specific module (appframework) will work in "development" mode, which means controllers and views will be auto-reloaded from the mavenized module at the given path: -DuiFramework.development.appframework="/Users/djazayeri/Documents/git-repositories/openmrs-module-appframework" Note that this is purely the *framework*, i.e. it doesn't include anything new in the UI, besides a test "Hello User" page. *App Framework module* To see a working example of how the UI Framework module can be used, you can check out my second piece of work, which is what I actually discussed with Mike to crystalize things. This module is the foundation of a new UI approach that is "app-based". "App" basically means what you'd expect if you're familiar with android or iphone home screens: it's a name, an icon, and a url to go to when you click it. These can be enabled per-user or per-role, so the idea is that whenever you log in, or click "home", you'd see a list of your available apps. (Some of us think this is the direction our new UI should move; you'll definitely hear more from me soon.) @Dave, I've included the idea of an AppFactory, so something like HFFS can provide multiple apps depending on the system configuration. I moved over a bit of the actual 2.x content and packaged this as a "Manage Metadata" app, which shows the use of all the 2.x features (pages, fragments, decorators, and fields) as well as the use of webModuleApplicationContext.xml to create an app. *What's Next?* My immediate next steps are to modify the existing 2.x UI documentation to refer to the new packaging as just a plain OpenMRS module, rather than its own webapp under openmrs-contrib. Medium-term steps are: 1. work with Mike and PIH so they can start exercising the App and UI frameworks in some real use cases. Others are welcome to join in too! 2. do a couple of small apps (e.g. patient lookup, concept dictionary) to provide specific bits of improved UI, while building up a library of useful pages, fragments, and widgets. Thoughts? Comments? -Darius _________________________________________ To unsubscribe from OpenMRS Developers' mailing list, send an e-mail to [email protected] with "SIGNOFF openmrs-devel-l" in the body (not the subject) of your e-mail. [mailto:[email protected]?body=SIGNOFF%20openmrs-devel-l]
