Consider a HTML/CSS style GUI for manager and Reporter

[damies13]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Using HTML should make constructing the GUI easier to control and CSS should enable a prettier UI as well as making dark/light mode switching easier

Describe the solution you'd like Consider a HTML/CSS style GUI for manager and Reporter

Additional context The original idea I've been pondering for quite a while is to build an "electron" style app, but never knew how to do this with python apps, until a few days ago I found python-eel

I believe the pro's should outweigh the con's, here are what I think they are:

Pro's:

• Easier to implement dark/light mode (Issue #102)
• Easier to implement a pretty UI
• Easier for others for contributor's to maintain the GUI (HTML is more well known than TkInter)
• Ability to make the GUI available to multiple desktops, so another performance tester can take over for long running tests
• Ability to make a read only "watching" GUI for project members to watch the test while running
• Potential for more consistent GUI across all platforms
• GUI will be easier to test (can use SeleniumLibrary or Browser Library to test GUI)

Con's:

• GUI might be styled in line with the OS
• Need to re-write the entire GUI (need to this mostly for Issue #86 anyway)

[damies13]

I've created a mock up of just the about screen to give an idea what the UI could look like if this change

Light Mode	Dark Mode

Firefox (remote access)

[damies13]

These are the files from the mock up for future reference eel-test.zip

[damies13]

@PyHar, I think enough time has passed, and it's only been positive feedback so lets proceed with this idea.

There is an issue remaining to figure out, eel creates a http server (on port 8000 by default, though it's configurable) and rfswarm manager already has a http server on port 8138 by default, so no conflict, though I would rather have only 1 http server port if possible, so the first issue to figure out will be if we can tell eel to use the existing http server in rfswarm or get eel's http server to provide rfswarm's existing rest api (even if that means re-writhing the api code?

Do you want to start investigating what our options will be for this issue?

[damies13]

Today was out but had some time for research, I think I found the answer how to do the existing rest api in eel:

• under App options is the section app
• this let me to look at the custom_app.py example
• which eventually led me to HTTP Request Methods

So it seems we'll need to create a POST bottle route for each rest endpoint and re-write the rest API this way.