the future of JBeret-UI?

[crettig]

Hello,

I a planning to use JBeret (and JBeret-UI) for a new project and while there seems to be active development on JBeret the JBeret-UI submodule seems to be

more or less outdated (the last commit ap. 3 years ago and the framework still running against Angular 1.4).

Are the plans to upgrade JBeret-UI to a more revent Angular version or did the scope switch and you would recommend another webclient to use as administration gui?

best regards, chris

[cfang]

Thanks for your interest in JBeret.  We still plan to keep jberet-ui up to date with more recent and better versions of AngularJS and other technologies used therein. It's just that in the past year, the development priority has been more towards jberet core and other backend extensions.  To be precise, the last commit in jberet-ui was in 2018 Jan:

Github issue #104 (gulp build doesn't exit) · jberet/jsr352@0831145 · GitHub

[crettig]

Hello,

you are right: there was a commit but I think it was not developer related:)

The thing with Angular 1.4 is that it is very old and as I need to make extensions I am not sure if it is a good way to build on such an old version. Did you ever estimate how much effort it would be to upgrade to 6?

Or if (not sure of the efforts as I am not an Angular developer) I would upgrade it to 6, would you take it over officially?

regards, chris

[cfang]

Upgrading from the current AngularJS 1.4 to Angular 6 (or Angular 2, 4, 5) will be a major rewrite of jberet-ui, due to the drastic changes in Angular framework.  We understand it's important to keep jberet-ui up to the newer front-end technologies and will look into this.

[cfang]

We will evaluate React, Angular or Vue for the JavaScript framework to be used by future versions of jberet-ui.

[crettig]

Hello back and many thanks for this information.

I don't want to to stress you (really) but, as I need to decide between

* built upon Angular 1.4 and extend it, hoping that I only need to port my changes when you upgrade

* port JBeret-UI myself to Angular 6 and provide you with the upgraded version so that I can stick to your development stream

* do an admin client completely on my own

it would be good to know when you will come to a decision.

regards, chris

[cfang]

the next version of jberet-ui will be different from current version, in design, components, flow, navigation, etc.  Since Angular 2, 4, 5, 6 offers no backward compatibility to AngularJS 1, so upgrading to Angular 6 is not much different than switching to React in terms of the amount of work.  My current inclination is to use React, and use ui components from patternfly-react.  Patternfly is a Red Hat sponsored opensource project for enterprise app UI. 

[crettig]

Hi, this sounds to me that I should not invest anything in the current jberet-ui webclient. Do you have a rough timeline when you want to have a first version of the webclient - independent on the technology you plan to use?

[cfang]

Hard to estimate, it can take a couple of months or quarters.  I'd suggest you use the current jberet-ui, with your customization if needed.  ui is a field undergoing constant changing, so regardless which web client, or which version you use, you'll have to deal with changes, updates and upgrades all the time.  Using the current jberet-ui will also give us a better view of your requirements and any feature gaps and so we can incorporate into next version.

[crettig]

Hi,

ok, then we will try to go with the current Angular version. I am looking forward to hearing an announcement on the new enhanced version:)

chris