Hi All, Currently PhotArk web application (webapp) and google-app modules use just html files for UI and relying on Javascript for sending request back to PhotArk components and updating the markup on json callback. This design is hard to maintain and extend to add more features and customization.
If its ok with everyone I would like to start discussion about direction to improve the UI design/framework to allow customization and easy development to add more features. Here are some ideas to get the discussion rolling: 1. Add PhotArkRenderingServlet component to generate the markup for both webapp and google-app. The servlet will have PhotArkHtmlRenderer class to render html markups but not limited to it. External developers could replace this renderer with his own or extend the PhotArkHtmlRenderer to override some methods for custom behaviors. The advantage with this approach is that we control the rendering process which allows us to customize for PhotArk efficiency and performance. The downside is we control the rendering process (^_^) so we have to add some foundation code to make it work. 2. Use existing lightweight web framework that supports templating like Apache Click (http://click.apache.org/). This will allow reuse of html pages for easy maintenance. The advantage with this approach is that we have most boilerplate codes being taking care of by the web framework. Just need to our own custom code for PhotArk UI. The downside is we add dependency on another project and add learning curve to developers when trying to adopt PhotArk. Looking forward to hear from all of you. Thanks, - Henry
