Suggestion/Proposal: Duplicati GUI as web application (powered by ExtJS).

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Hello.

I've been creating ExtJS-based web applications for quite some time, that is 
why I think it would be awesome to build web-based GUI for Duplicati.

I assume that you guys know what ExtJS is, but if not then see 
http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/examples/ where it shows off some of its 
potential.

My personal view is that as of today duplicati suffers from the lack of the 
user friendly interface (wizards are OK but somewhat confusing for 
inexperienced users and not intuitive enough).

If you like the idea the only thing I ask for is the interface which the ExtJs 
application and web browser could talk to and interact with :-)

I outlined the proposed structure in the attached diagram (just an overview of 
the idea).

So... what do you think ? :-)

P.S. An excellent example: see Secunia PSI screenshots and code: 
https://secunia.com/products/consumer/psi/ it uses ExtJS as UI (using IE widget 
within the process window)

Original issue reported on code.google.com by Chieftai...@gmail.com on 18 May 2012 at 3:36

Attachments:

• duplicati-gui-structure-v01.gif

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That is some coincidence.

We are currently working on a 2.0 where there will be a new user interface.
I know that I will not be able to maintain multiple versions of a user 
interface,
but I also want Duplicati to look great and native on all platforms (unlike 
now).

I have investigated all the major cross platform GUI frameworks, and the most 
promising seems to be GTK, but it does not really look native on either OSX or 
Windows. And the C# bindings seemed unstable at the time.

So we decided to go with a hosted web browser, where the window is basically a 
web page with no address bar or buttons. This also ensures that the solution is 
extensible by others, and can be themed easily with CSS for those wishing to 
re-brand Duplicati. And this also ensures that we can easily support remote 
administration later on.

For the past months (on and off), I have implemented a framework with a tray 
icon that is native for Windows, OSX and Linux. I have since worked on 
implementing a solution in jQueryUI based on the mockups René has provided.

But yesterday I decided that jQueryUI is not the right tool for me. I spend too 
much time trying to get basic things like a context menu working with the 
jQueryUI theme. So I started an implementation in extjs-4.1. I have worked 
quite a lot with extjs back when it was 2.x, so I know some of the stuff, but a 
lot has changed. But even with a few hours of work, it already looks more 
promising than the jQueryUI implementation.

The setup is fairly close to your picture, there is a small hosted webserver, 
which has a special handler script called control.cgi (not really a cgi script 
though), that takes request e.g. "localhost/control.cgi?action=run-backup&id=1".

If you would like to help out, send me an email, and I can send you some 
mockups, and whatever extjs code I have. I also have example service responses 
for all requests so you can work with it even without having the Duplicati 
service running.

Original comment by kenneth@hexad.dk on 18 May 2012 at 5:17

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Original comment by rst...@gmail.com on 21 May 2012 at 5:06

• Added labels: Type-Enhancement, Usability