Er, what does this mean? What is MVVM?
On 30/01/17 13:57, Jan Dittrich wrote:
Hello Wikitext-l,
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TL;DR: The Wikidata team is considering to use a MVVM/Single-State solution
for Wikidata’s UI. What are requirements and concerns would be important to
consider?
-----------------------------------
Wikidata’s current UI is built on jQuery UI. Since jQueryUI shall be faded
out, we are looking at possible future frameworks or paradigms to build our
UI on. Our needs are:
- Having a sustainable foundation
- Being able to handle complex state dependencies (simplest are like: "if
element x is in edit mode, set element y to saving mode")
- A solution that is easy to learn for beginners and easy to read and
reason about for our engineers.
State management and data/event propagation goes beyond of what OOUI can
provide, as far as I (Jan) know. So an obvious candidate was looking into
MVVM solutions of which the most well known is the React library.
We had a deeper look at Vue.js which is known for having a large community,
too, but being easier to understand and not using an additional patent
clause in its licensing.
We see the following possible advantages:
- Better modularization
- understandability of our code, in particular reasoning about event- and
data-flow
- better separation of concerns and testability for:
-- HTML templates
-- Component interactivity
-- Data manipulation
-- connection to backend-API
- If we use a well documented framework, learning to contribute is much
easier compared to software for which there is only auto-generated
code-level-docs
Here are some answers to obvious questions:
1) Does using a MVVM mean we need to write mixed JS/CSS/HTML in a new
syntax? (aka JSX)? -> No, it is possible, but for most frameworks (Vue,
too) normal HTML templates are used
2) Does that mean that people coming from Object oriented languages will
need to learn a whole new paradigm – reactive, pure-functional programming?
-> While there are some elements of functional programming used in
react-like-frameworks, I would (subjectively) say that few additional,
totally new knowledge is needed and most can be covered by "take
parameters, work with them, return values; don't manipulate non-local
values"
3) How does DOM access work? Does this mean no jQuery?
-> DOM can be still be directly accessed. Libraries like jQuery can still
be reused (even if they might not be necessary in many points any more).
However, to change data or dom persistently, you need to tell the library
(which is not unusual, afaic)
There are also some other concerns:
- Should we introduce a new dependency like a framework as Vue?
- What would be the process of introducing such a dependency (if we agree
on one)?
- Can we agree on this (or another?) paradigm for managing complex UIs, so
that it is not a Wikidata-only solution, but could be used by other
Wikimedia projects in the future, too?
- How will this work with OOUIjs? OOUI seems to be mainly responsible for
creating DOM elements and this actions are usually owned by the MVVM
framework. One can use hooks to use libraries like OOUI and such, but it
feels like having the same functionality twice. A possible solution would
be using OOUI styles and markup but leaving DOM creation to the framework.
Do you think using Vue (or a similar framework) is an option for us? What
are requirements and concerns which would be important?
Kind Regards,
Jan
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