Open Stack

We the horizon team were asked several times on adopting UX
technologies. This is not the first time. Adrian also contacted us.
I agree that the current horizon depends on old technologies and it
prevents from adopting more dynamic interfaces in client sides
and less performance. Django is still a valid choice for server-side
implementation but processing all in server sides is not modern.

The current state of horizon is almost in the maintenance mode. We
have less contributors release by release.
The current horizon team is very small (and horizon cores except one
are part-time with other projects or outside of OpenStack upstream),
so I don't think the horizon team can lead the effort properly.

I think it is better that folks interested in this start an effort to
implement OpenStack dashboard in modern technologies for better UX
as a separate project (or a separate branch).

By starting from a separate project, we can avoid topics around horizon plugin.
Such new effort should decide whether they include all or adopt some
plugin mechanism too.
If the new project succeeds to attract developers, more projects will
be supported sooner or later.
Recent technologies may attract most developers as they tend to be
familiar with them compared to technologies used by horizon.

Regarding a topic of packaging raised by zigo, I am not sure it is a
problem the OpenStack community should solve.
I know legacy packagers would like to use single versions of libraries
in their contents at the same time
so they don't like npm/yarn based JS dependencies.
I think it should be discussed among packagers and JS community like
npm, yarn, webpack and so on.
I personally don't think it is a good thing to limit technology
choices and not to use common technologies only due to the packaging
reason.

Thanks,
Akihiro Motoki (irc: amotoki)

On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 5:05 AM Mohammed Naser <mnaser at vexxhost.com> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I was wondering if anyone in the community has explored the idea of implementing PatternFly inside Horizon.  It seems like it shares a lot of the similar ideas that we use and we could really benefit from using a common library that already exists with a lot of good UX thought behind it.
>
> I know it's based on React which is a bit of a leap from where Horizon is today.  However, I'd be curious if the Horizon team is interested in figuring out a plan to make a migration to something like this happen.
>
> Personally, I think I would be able to provide resources to have someone do this work.  However, if this seems like a huge stretch and architecture change where it actually makes more sense to stand this up from scratch (and implement an architecture where the dashboard talks directly to the APIs?), perhaps we should explore that.
>
> I also would like to hear more from our extended community too, as I think we really need to improve our user interface experience.
>
> Thanks,
> Mohammed
>
> --
> Mohammed Naser
> VEXXHOST, Inc.