Change the word "backend" to "service"/"provider" in UI

[christophfriedrich]

To avoid confusion, what has so far been called "backend group" should be a "service provider" (or short "service" or short "provider"), and what has been called "backend" should be an "instance" or "implementation" (or maaaybe "version").

Reference from the API spec:

Well-Known URI (see RFC 57855) for openEO, listing all implemented openEO versions supported by the service provider. This allows a client to easily identify the most recent openEO implementation it supports.

This should be changed in the UI as well as in the code and the database 'schemes'.

[m-mohr]

I'm all in for UI improvements, but not sure about back-end changes if it's major work to do. If it's major work I'd prefer to just document it well enough and then leave back-end changes for later.

[christophfriedrich]

Thinking about it, this isn't as bad an issue as I thought a while ago.

I had a quick look again and found five occurrences of "backend" in the UI:

• At the very top of the Discover section: "This is a list of all available openEO backends:"
• In the production-readiness notice: "This backend is (NOT) production-ready."
• In the outdated-data notice: "This backend was recently unavailable for crawling."
• In the About section: "openEO hub is a tool to discover backends that support the openEO API.
• Again in the About section, next paragraph: "The data is crawled from the backends and then cached, so may lag behind reality."

In none of these cases I find the word "backend" to actually be dramatic. In fact, using "implementation" instead of "backend" would probably confuse me more -- e.g. I would expect a "list of implementations" to contain links to software packages like on our Github page, not information on what some deployment of such a software package is capable of. And something like "This instance is production-ready" is probably more obfuscated to the average non-tech-savvy user than the current wording.*

The word "backend group" is not used in the UI at all, only internally.

Changing it in the code would be nice because all sorts of things are called backend at the moment (due to the natural growth/agile development of the project), but it would be quite a bit of work without actual benefit so I'll postpone this for (much) later.

Let me know if anyone thinks different on this matter.

* "Backend" is a rather normal word, isn't it? I use it all the time and assume that average users know roughly what it means, but thinking about it this may not be true for people outside our IT bubble... :thinking:

[m-mohr]

These occurances are easy to fix with two well-known words: provider and service.

• At the very top of the Discover section: "This is a list of all available openEO backends:"

backends => providers

• In the production-readiness notice: "This backend is (NOT) production-ready."

backend => service

• In the outdated-data notice: "This backend was recently unavailable for crawling."

backend => service

• In the About section: "openEO hub is a tool to discover backends that support the openEO API.

backends => providers or services

• Again in the About section, next paragraph: "The data is crawled from the backends and then cached, so may lag behind reality."

backends => services

* "Backend" is a rather normal word, isn't it? I use it all the time and assume that average users know roughly what it means, but thinking about it this may not be true for people outside our IT bubble... 🤔

I rarely used backend before openEO. A word used more often is server, I guess. But for "normal" people service / provider should be better to understand. :-)