Hi! Guys, since there are started talks about "ajaxificationized beautification" :) then I would like to say that actually at SUSE we are now doing completely other way and I would like to explain what, how and why.
Because of the nature of the SUSE, we have a lot of our own specific parts that needs to be integrated with a Spacewalk. This leads to a need of more modular architecture that needs to be even more flexible. Hence of the above, we decided to develop in the way Portlets are done, where the applications are residing in a parallel to the main app (Spacewalk in this case) and are just embedded into the main UI. This will allow us go away from Struts in general and also avoid a lot of unnecessary code. That said, every add-on we do, will be served as a separated application, the very similar way how Portlets are working. Now, to do this, we've decided to use Google Web Toolkit with a conjunction of Vaadin (server-side) framework. This gives us: - Homogeneous environment. All code is written in Java (no more JavaScript and XML). - Much simpler architecture. - Up to 70% coding reduction. - "Full-blown" Java. And it is not just a subset of Java, as in case of a pure GWT. - Ability to use jQuery or Dojo or other stuff, if we ever would need them at all. There are many various discussions about how good/bad GWT is, but we weighted all the tradeoffs, pros and cons, we were looking at other stuff, like Wicket or ZK and even OpenLaszlo, as well as ExtGWT or SmartGWT but we are convinced that GWT with Vaadin is the very way we will go with. Hence we are going to package GWT with Vaadin and ship it with our SUSE Manager. We understand that this is a very radical change and very different from where Spacewalk is right now. We also understand that lots of people might not like this and prefer to stay with old traditional way. But at the same time we strive to achieve best user experience as well as simpler maintainability along with many other goals. If somebody in a Spacewalk community is interested to try it out, the best place to "attack" is to port all the Perl-based user interface and get rid of that PXT session thing as a whole (and probably from the whole Perl itself as well). Vaadin: https://vaadin.com/ Demo: http://demo.vaadin.com/sampler Add-ons (if you think the standard lib is not enough for you): https://vaadin.com/directory Quick start: https://vaadin.com/learn 10 minutes tutorial: https://vaadin.com/tutorial Documentation: https://vaadin.com/book * * * Now, as of Dojo discussion, at SUSE we would vote for jQuery instead. Taking "$FOO is in $DISTRO" is, of course, a plus, but this is "plus" for a Fedora Linux distribution, but is not a value of a specific library itself. Take care. :) -- Bo SUSE LINUX Products GmbH On 06/20/2011 05:33 PM, Miroslav Suchý wrote:
I know that we thought about using javascripts tabs in webui... Well if somebody want to work on that, I announce you that dojo [1] framework is now part of Fedora and EPEL (I done the review). I encourage you to use it. It has two plus: a) it is the only one js toolkit in Fedora b) it is the fastest one from all existing toolkits [2] (ehm, sometimes second fastest). [1] http://dojotoolkit.org/ [2] http://dante.dojotoolkit.org/taskspeed/#
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