Aikau Update, May 2015

[ddraper]

Introduction

I've been pretty quiet with blogs and social media of late so I thought I’d provide a bit of an insight into what’s been going on with the Aikau UI framework.

Processes

On the whole things have been going exceptionally well. We've managed to maintain our weekly release cycle since the beginning of the year and have now made 18 releases (including 3 hotfix releases which were useful in proving that that element of our development process works).

Although the team is incredibly small (just the two of us at the moment), we’re now servicing 4 different Alfresco Engineering teams working on a variety of projects, along with a small handful of customer engagements.

Because we have such short Sprints we’re able to turn around requirements and bug fixes incredibly quickly, and thanks to our automated unit tests (which just passed the 75% code coverage mark with the 1.0.16 release) we’re able to ensure backwards compatibility.

 

Automated Testing

At the moment we only have automated testing against Firefox and Chrome (on a local Vagrant VM) but have already successfully tested against a Selenium Grid that uses Internet Explorer and are looking to start incorporating this into testing in the future. At the moment we still rely on manual testing to pick up IE bugs.

The teams that we’re supporting raise bugs and feature requests as they find them and we prioritize them as necessary, ensuring that bugs are prioritized above anything else to try to maintain zero technical debt.

Educational Material

As well as improving our unit test coverage we’re also trying to improve our JSDoc documentation and when we work on any module we look to try and provide a useful description and examples of how it should be used. We’re still a long way from where we want to be, but we are making steady progress.

Another way in which we’re trying to provide educational material for Aikau is with the new index page for the test application. If you were to clone the GitHub repository and run:

mvn clean install jetty:run‍

...then you could access the page at “http://localhost:8089/aikau/page/tp/ws/Index” and use the “Filter results” box to search for widgets or services that you might be interested in. We’re updating the unit test WebScript descriptor files to set more meaningful “shortname” and “description” values - once again, this is an ongoing process.

 

Document Library

Although our primary goal is to support the other Engineering teams development work we have an ongoing background task in porting the Document Library over to use Aikau. When we initially started looking at this back in the very early days we were only trying to port the existing capabilities and find ways to harness the existing action handling code. Now we’re looking to improve the Document Library with features such as inline commenting; inline content creation and metadata editing; popup previews; and drag-and-drop version update. We also want to make sure that it’s possible to easily create a configurable Document Library within a Share page and a standalone Aikau client via library files that can be imported into your Aikau page WebScripts.

The Document Library isn't in bad shape at the moment - the biggest challenge now is to work through the remaining actions that aren't supported and find the best way of being able to support legacy Share based XML configuration for actions, as well as making it easy to use actions in non-Share based standalone clients. You can follow the progress we make by cloning this GitHub repository which is a simple Aikau client with a page showing the authenticated user’s “User Home” directory. It would be really good to get some feedback on what we’re doing - particularly with regards to whether or not you’d be able to customize this Document Library more easily to fit your specific use cases.

 

Pull Requests, Feature Requests and Bug Reports

The only less positive to report so far is the lack of pull requests that we've received. The Alfresco Community were apparently clamouring for an easier way of contributing code to Alfresco and Aikau provides the easiest way to do that so far. It’s possible that this is because it’s still very new and that only the recent 5.0.1 and 5.0.d releases support the external Aikau libraries.

I do see that we get a lot of traffic on the GitHub site (around 50 unique visitors per day) and that the tutorials are getting a lot of hits. We've also had a couple of external issues raised which we've tried to turn around as quickly as possible.

 

I also note that there is still some general concerns about Aikau in the Alfresco IRC channel. Maybe this is to be expected as Aikau still needs to prove it’s worth in the field - but I can say that the feedback within the company is incredibly positive and Aikau is definitely showing its value in accelerating the rate of UI development work internally. Hopefully once we've set out the ways in which Aikau can guarantee future-proof customizations from release-to-release of Share then the benefit will be seen outside of Alfresco as well. One thing I would say is that the discussions on IRC never materialise into issues on GitHub or JIRA - if you have something you want fixing or improving then let us know! We've already implemented feature requests and bug fixes that came from the forums and have added others to the backlog to work on in future sprints.

Long Term Thinking

We know that we’re not following the latest trends (interestingly I've noticed that the conversation about the best UI framework to use has shifted from Angular to React in recent months, no doubt it will have moved on to something else 12 months from now) but there’s no reason to think that Aikau won’t be around for the long haul - especially when you consider that the vast majority of Share is built on YUI2 which is approaching its 10th anniversary. Our black-box, widget-based, declarative approach to page creation is also holding strong with rewrites and updates to widgets being made without needing to make any changes to the pages that use them. We’ve also been able to migrate from Dojo 1.9.0 to 1.10.4 fairly seamlessly where our unit tests were able to quickly identify the few bugs that the upgrade introduced.

Summary

So in summary it feels as though we’re on the right track. Our processes are working, we’re making regular releases, code coverage is steadily increasing, JSDoc is improving and we’re adding more widgets and services every week. If you've not tried out Aikau then why not follow the tutorial and see how easy it is to quickly develop reliable, web-based clients for Alfresco.