Investigate using Blacklight as "API"

psu-libraries / cho

Project for Penn State Library's cultural heritage object repository.

Apache License 2.0

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Investigate using Blacklight as "API" #564

Open awead opened 6 years ago

awead commented 6 years ago

Blacklight as the option of using it as an API instead of an engine. This could have some advantages for CHO, namely that we would be free to implement any kind of UI, without the need for Bootstrap, and use things like CSS grid or other approaches.

Additionally, we may more insulated from version upgrades because the API could theoretically remain more stable.

Disadvantages would include having to rewrite catalog controller interactions, and search and show pages views.

awead commented 6 years ago

Options:

write our own controllers that make calls to Blacklight and parse JSON that's returned
remove all view code from Blacklight and use our own layouts and views
use webpack option and possibly omit bootstrap
just use webpack option and add our own stuff as needed

ntallman commented 6 years ago

Might I suggest this be tabled until 1.x?

awead commented 6 years ago

We should explore this now, at least, and determine what option we'd like to go with. Choosing to re-write the view code would be a lot easier to do now than later. Currently, we're not using that much of Blacklight, only search results and show page views.