Revamp showcase - Decide new framework

[lanterno]

Before revamping the showcase, I went through it to:

• [x] Review the exist code and determine the different components
• [x] Analyze those components to determine their requirements (for the desired revamp)
• [x] Propose two alternative programing frameworks for the implementation
• [x] Discuss with team and either add new alternatives or choose one -> go with VueJS

[lanterno]

Existing system components:

• data: as YAML objects in directory-based tree structure
  • Depends on a schema library “strictyaml”. This library is also used to validate the existing data. (1)
• Data module: responsible for loading the data from its YAML files to python formats.
• History of changes (6 changes)
• server: 100 lines
• Custom data presentation structure
  • Some data require special display so it was included in special files that contained both data and UI design. This is going to be the most difficult to migrate (into a cleaner format)
• Tests: very simplistic tests (very easy to migrate)
  • runs on GitHub CI
  • The only important test is one that imports all data and applies the schema model for validation.

[lanterno]

System analysis:

• Existing data system is simple on purpose to keep the app serverless
• Changes history might be better to be migrated to GitHub releases (or maintained by a changelog tool)
• the only goal of the server is
  • page routing
  • serving static data
• Custom data presentation:
  • Complex to standardize
  • Or could use a CMS (over engineering?)
• Data loader: other languages might maintain even better libraries for schema validation.
  • Should we use OpenAPI for model validation? Is there better alternatives?
    • Maybe something like pydantic?

[lanterno]

Proposal #1

Typescript/ VueJs/ Nuxt combination

Why?

• No need for a server:
  • Works well with static data
  • page routing is done on the frontend
  • Good tools for schema validation
• Can be compiled on the CI and deployed as a static site (maybe on GitHub pages)

Why not?

• Learning curve and configuration

Proposal #2

Hugo!

Why?

• Targets static sites
  • easier - faster - no learning curve
• Easy to migrate to it from python templating
• Nice themes out of the box
• Based on Go (a good opportunity to practice it?)

Why not?

• Is it easy to add the data loader?
• Is it easy to add tests?

Hugo investigation:

• Very Flexible
• Won’t support data validation. We can keep it in Python.
  • Or port it to go (to maintain only a single language per project)
• Supports YAML files to import the projects.

[ineiti]

Let's go with VueJS