Technology choice

[SteveALee]

We need to get started on the code ASAP and after spending considerable time looking at various technologies I've been down a few dead ends. Thus I'm opening up the discussion for the best way out of analysis paralysis.

Must have Technical Requirements

• Responsive layout - for tablet and desktop (small screen is lower priority)
• Progressively enhanced - works on a range of older devices (forward compatibility) and with poor connectivity
• Touch friendly
• Accessible - goes without saying even though designed for coga
• Low technical barriers to contribution - simple over clever, libraries over frameworks
• Modern Workflow to include GitHub Flow, high test coverage and CI / CD
• Minimal dependencies
• Fast load on client

  Possible Technical Requirements

• Off-line mode - service workers as app cache is so broken
• Scalable

  Open questions

• Stick to ES5 or use ES6 to ES5 conversion (eg using babel) which complicates dev workflow
  • Node now supports some parts of ES6 (most notably it stick to CommonJS modules)
• Build to use NPM scripts + make or webpack? Hotload looks very nice

  Progressive enhancement

This is the biggest sticking point. The point is that a user experience should be possible with just HTML/CSS and minimal JS. If possible, the UI gets enhanced through client side JS or latest CSS etc. Most modern tooling is focussed on client side behaviour with AJAX or websocket communication to the client. While there is an interest in so call "isomorphic" code this is really just to get an initial page load from HTML for which the client side takes over, not a complete UX using only HTML forms and links.

After exploring many client side technologies and coming up with a short list of riot and possibly altjs we still hit PE as the problem. For example riot.js looked really interesting but it's client side rendering strips all event handling. Riact seems much the same and is also a much bigger learning curve.

[SteveALee]

JQuery Mobile

So jQuery Mobile is the only platform I've found that comes close to PE requirements.

Pros

• Good PE
• Good set of touch enabled widgets
• reasonably flexible
• easy to understand and reasonably small
• mature

Cons

• Little activity over last year or so. Might just be it is stable but worrying is now stale.
• pulls in a pretty large dependency of jQuery which his almost not needed these days (event normalisation is useful for one thing).
  • however both jQM an jQ allow custom builds

I suggest we start with jQM, nodejs and Hapi.. Hapi plugins for components. Perhaps senecajs

Open Qs

• Can JQM layout be tailored enough or is it fixed?
• Can we get great PE with it or do we still restrict ourselves to a client rendered SPA?
• Can we create composite components? use jQ plugins like jQM?
  • On both client and server? Or do we just go webservice style using Senecjs for example?

[SteveALee]

After further review the status of JQM has become a concern. There's occasional message about a coming release and some project code activity. However very little public communication or collaboration.

There is also something of a backlash against pure client side SPA in conjunction with feeds. So called 'isomorphic' or 'universal' takes the approach of server side rendering and then browser SPA takes over if available. This gives Progressive Enhancement - though SEO seems to be the main motivation.

React + redux looks liek a better approach than many but in the end Reactive Programming with observables hits the sweet spot. RxJS and Cyclejs are the focus of much activity.

See wiki for choices