Towards building a JavaScript user interface to CubicWeb

This post is an introduction of a series of articles dealing with an on-going experiment on building a JavaScript user interface to CubicWeb, to ultimately replace the web component of the framework. The idea of this series is to present the main topics of the experiment, with open questions in order to eventually engage the community as much as possible. The other side of this is to experiment a blog driven development process, so getting feedback is the very point of it!

As of today, three main topics have been identified:

• the Web API to let the client and server communicate,
• the issue of representing the application schema client-side, and,
• the construction of components of the web interface (client-side).

As part of the first topic, we'll probably rely on another experimental work about REST-fulness undertaken recently in pyramid-cubicweb (see this head for source code). Then, it appears quite clearly that we'll need sooner or later a representation of data on the client-side and that, quite obviously, the underlying format would be JSON. Apart from exchanging of entities (database) information, we already anticipate on the need for the HATEOAS part of REST. We already took some time to look at the existing possibilities. At a first glance, it seems that hydra is the most promising in term of capabilities. It's also built using semantic web technologies which definitely grants bonus point for CubicWeb. On the other hand, it seems a bit isolated and very experimental, while JSON API follows a more pragmatic approach (describe itself as an anti-bikeshedding tool) and appears to have more traction from various people. For this reason, we choose it for our first draft, but this topic seems so central in a new UI, and hard to hide as an implementation detail; that it definitely deserves more discussion. Other candidates could be Siren, HAL or Uber.

Concerning the schema, it seems that there is consensus around JSON-Schema so we'll certainly give it a try.

Finally, while there is nothing certain as of today we'll probably start on building components of the web interface using React, which is also getting quite popular these days. Beyond that choice, the first practical task in this topic will concern the primary view system. This task being neither too simple nor too complicated will hopefully result in a clearer overview of what the project will imply. Then, the question of edition will come up at some point. In this respect, perhaps it'll be a good time to put the UX question at a central place, in order to avoid design issues that we had in the past.

Feedback welcome!