Coming back to these existential questions from my phone:
*Jan Høydahl* Added 1 hour ago There are many opinions around admin UI. So I think the best place to start would be a new mail-thread in dev@ to discuss the way forward. Before we start a major re-work, we should probably ask ourselves a few existential questions: - Should we turn Amin UI into a standalone app instead of embedded in Solr? I think it should be a standalone app. There are many advantages gained from a separation of such concerns. Some of the ones include, the people who work on the Admin UI do not need to be expected to know the Java workflow, necessarily. This reality widens the net for who can contribute. Testing becomes a lot easier because JS developers are accustomed to building tests for static assets and self-contained node apps. They generally know less about testing a bit of JS within a massive Java project. The test could also run independently for changes that only affect the front end. Adding test coverage without adding time to tests sounds awesome. There are quite a few tickets over the years that have seemed to suggest that people want more fine-grained control over the Solr admin UI overall. Two recent tickets discussed topics like running a Solr Admin app on only one node and disabling it al together for whatever reason. See: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-14014. - What UI framework? Guess anything is better than current EOL, but will largely depend on who is willing to do the job! I’m happy to take this on (and willing to follow through on completing in my nights and weekends), but I am mostly framework agnostic. My stronge preference would be React, provided the license is kosher. There was one blip of “practically unusable for most orgs” a couple years back, but Facebook made it right really soon after. However, I’m flexible. Angular (not JS) and Vue are also great. I would recommend we consider Typescript also because of the size of project and number of strongly-typed devs on this mailing list. My only reservation with TypeScript, though it may not apply in this case, is that the supersets of JS have changed a lot more than the frameworks. While CoffeeScript was an unnecessary layer of abstraction from my limited perspective, TypeScript might make JS more embraceable to a list of Java hackers. - Current UI has no test coverage, can we do better with the new UI? It’s imperative.React, Angular, and Vue each make it easy to include tests. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/SOLR-12276?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=17076204#comment-17076204
