The experience while navigating throughout the UI of Suse Manager it's not that nice. Whenever we navigate to a new page, the whole page gets refreshed and recreated, even when half of it didn't change a thing, for instance, the menu, topbar, and the notifications WebSocket connection, which in my opinion doesn't provide a smooth experience.
This project has the goal to test out an automatic way to transform the Suse Manager UI into a Single Page Application.
My idea is to have something working with the following workflow:
- Access Suse Manager - nothing changes here, a full render would be done.
- Clicking on a Menu Link: instead of doing a full refresh, we could wrap all the links with a piece of javascript that would make an ajax call in the background with an extra parameter: "URL?noframe=true" and attach the rendered result without the frame to the existing page body. (body.innerHTML = result)
This can be tricky especially when the UI is composed of so many different technologies but seems like an idea worth trying.
Drawbacks
For older parts, this would only work for navigation (page transitions). Old form posts would never work as a SPA in an automated way, but it can be a nice intermediate solution until everything is migrated to react, where we can follow a more SPA development mindset.
Update
I tried to implement a custom solution for this and the first results are promising! The navigation is looking awesome and way more smooth.
Also some libraries to try out:
- https://github.com/liferay/senna.js
- https://github.com/MoOx/pjax
- https://github.com/barbajs/barba
- https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks
- https://github.com/gmrchk/swup
This project is part of:
Hack Week 18
Activity
