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cardinalitypuzzles / cardboard

Dashboard for managing puzzles and tracking status during a puzzle hunt
MIT License
31 stars 20 forks source link

Consolidate frontend UI framework #714

Open akirabaruah opened 11 months ago

akirabaruah commented 11 months ago

Right now, it's a mix of React and Django templating.

rgossiaux commented 10 months ago

Personally I actually don't think this is necessarily desirable a priori. Django's pretty good for rendering basic HTML templates and forms

akirabaruah commented 10 months ago

I think @asdfryan and others brought this up recently as a point of potential developer friction (i.e. frontend devs having to know/learn both React and Django templating).

I agree that Django form handling seems a lot simpler compared to pure React-based options at the moment, though.

akirabaruah commented 10 months ago

Also, I don't think we need this for MITMH 2024, but leaving on the Milestone in case someone happens to want to move it forward.

akirabaruah commented 10 months ago

Personally I actually don't think this is necessarily desirable a priori. Django's pretty good for rendering basic HTML templates and forms

Thought about this some more: For a CRUD-y Django app like Cardboard, it might be simpler to maintain mostly HTML and avoid React as much as possible. Have we considered using something like HTMX (https://htmx.org) for the frontend instead?

In other words, do we really need React and Redux at all?

npinsker commented 10 months ago

In other words, do we really need React and Redux at all?

Maybe this should be a new issue? (the question's like the exact opposite of this issue :P)

rgossiaux commented 10 months ago

I'm not personally particularly attached to React but I also don't really see any particular reason to move off it. Since it's the most common frontend framework I do think that's a strong reason to keep it (makes it easier to contribute)

Redux I don't particularly like & ditto react-table, I wouldn't mind moving off either these libraries if we find a good alternative and someone wants to sink time into it.

akirabaruah commented 10 months ago

Maybe this should be a new issue? (the question's like the exact opposite of this issue :P)

Haha agreed that I brought up a completely opposite point. Since the question of "to React or not to React" is somewhat of a precondition to whether we go all in on React for the frontend UI, I think we should keep the conversation here instead of forking off a new issue.

I also agree with @rgossiaux that React has a large developer mindshare, which can increase contributions. I'm fine keeping it around, though the HTMX example I gave earlier is arguably much simpler than React.

Redux I don't particularly like & ditto react-table, I wouldn't mind moving off either these libraries if we find a good alternative and someone wants to sink time into it.

+1 Redux feels like overkill for this app - maybe we could try using Zustand instead? Or just use React Context?

Filed https://github.com/cardinalitypuzzles/cardboard/issues/772 to remove react-table.