[openstack-dev] [Horizon] the future of angularjs development in Horizon

Jiri Tomasek jtomasek at redhat.com
Tue Nov 11 09:53:53 UTC 2014


Hey,

Thanks for writing this up!

I am including some notes and questions inline...

On 11/11/2014 08:02 AM, Richard Jones wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> At the summit last week, we developed a plan for moving forward with 
> modernising Horizon's UI using AngularJS. If you weren't at that 
> meeting and are interested in helping out with this effort please let 
> me know!
>
> The relevant etherpad from the meeting:
> https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/kilo-horizon-contributors-meetup
>
> TL;DR: piece by piece we will replace Django views in Horizon with 
> angular views, and we're going to start with Identity
>
> First up, I'd like to ask the UX folk who raised their hands in that 
> meeting to indicate which of the Identity panes we should start with. 
> I believe a wizard was mentioned, as a way to exercise the new wizard 
> code from Maxime.
>
> At the same time, I'm looking at updating the AngularJS 
> recommendations in the wiki. I believe other aspects of the current 
> approach to angular code should also be revisited, if we're to scale 
> up to the full angular front-end envisaged. I'd appreciate if those 
> interested in this aspect in particular could contact me so we can 
> sort this out as a team!
I am interested.
>
> I'd like to start the design work for the new REST API layer we'll be 
> exposing to the angular application code, but that is also part of the 
> broader discussion about the structure of the angular code in the 
> Horizon application as mentioned above. Should it be a new blueprint/spec?

I think spec seems appropriate.  Do you think using django-angular would 
be convenient?

>
> There were some discussions around tooling. We're using xstatic to 
> manage 3rd party components, but there's a lot missing from that 
> environment. I hesitate to add supporting xstatic components on to the 
> already large pile of work we have to do, so would recommend we switch 
> to managing those components with bower instead. For reference the 
> list of 3rd party components I used in angboard* (which is really only 
> a teensy fraction of the total application we'd end up with, so this 
> components list is probably reduced):
>
>     json3
>     es5-shim
>     angular
>     angular-route
>     angular-cookies
>     angular-animate
>     angular-sanitize
>     angular-smart-table
>     angular-local-storage
>     angular-bootstrap
>     angular-translate
>     font-awesome
>     boot
>     underscore
>     ng-websocket
>
> Just looking at PyPI, it looks like only a few of those are in 
> xstatic, and those are out of date.
>
> grunt provides a lot of features for developing an angular interface. 
> In particular LiveReload accelerates development significantly. 
> There's a django-livereload but it uses tiny-lr under the hood, so 
> we're still using a node application for LiveReload support... so it 
> might make sense to just use grunt. grunt provides many other features 
> as well (wiredep integration with bower, build facilities with ngMin, 
> test monitoring and reload etc).
>
> There seemed to be agreement to move to jasmine (from qunit) for 
> writing the tests. It's not noted in the etherpad, but I recall karma 
> was accepted as a given for the test runner. For those not in the 
> meeting, angboard uses mocha+chai for test writing, but I agreed that 
> jasmine is acceptable, and is already used by Storyboard (see below).
>
> Also, phantomjs so we don't have to fire up a browser for exercising 
> (what should hopefully be an extensive) unit test suite.
>
> The Storyboard project has successfully integrated these tools into 
> the OpenStack CI environment.

Using javascript tooling (yeoman, grunt, bower, etc.) has this issue of 
being dependent on nodejs which if I recall correctly is causing 
problems for packagers as some versions of these tools require different 
nodejs versions - please Mathias correct me if I am wrong. I know this 
discussion has been here before, but using these tools is necessary for 
effective development. So we need to resolve the problem asap. 
Storyboard does not have this issue as it is infra thing.

Petr Belanyi has added optional jshint install for js linting into 
Horizon and it installs nodejs as it depends on it. Could this approach 
work for our need of js tooling too? [1]

How hard is it going to be if we'll need to go xstatic way? Is that even 
possible?

>
>
>      Richard
>
> * https://github.com/r1chardj0n3s/angboard
>
>
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[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/97237/


Jiri
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