Horizon topics during Kilo development summit
The past Kilo development summit had the following things for Horizon covered.
Horizon Operators, Deployers, and Users
The first session was a meetup between Horizon developers and operators. Most named painpoint was: managing a huge number of users and resources. Missing pagination on all kinds of pages was mentioned a few times. The other issue seems to be, that region switching requires too many manual steps or sometimes behaves not as expected. Overall that should be improved in terms of user experience.
The last issue mentioned was: error messages often don't really help. There's a blueprint to improve error messaging. Developers understand, that this is an issue, but sadly it's not going to be solved that easily.
Keystone-Horizon-CLI/Federation/SSO
A Keystone-Horizon cross-project session was held to discuss issues around integrating federated authentication and single sign in for Keystone and Horizon.
Django-Angular Playing Nice
Thai Tran presented his ideas on making Django-Angular Playing Nice. Basic idea is to slowly replace Django parts by using pure JavaScript and AngularJS and have just a tiny core proxying JSON-data from underlying services. That'd be the least obstructive way to re-implement everything in using JavaScript and AngularJS. This was already proposed at the last summit; since then, not much has happened yet.
Re-Implementation in JavaScript using AngularJS
Richard Jones from Rackspace presented his demo on re-implementing Horizon nearly purely in JavaScript. There were quite a few people in the audience, apparently doing more or less the same. Unfortunately, they didn't chose to share their code or to propse that code upstream.
Horizon-Contributors meetup
We discussed a lot topics. Sadly, we shared a the same room with keystone contributors and it was quite noisy.
JavaScript
Again, using a more JavaScript-centric approach for Horizon was discussed. AngularJS was chosen as the framework to be used. The navigation system and panels will stay in Django. Content panel is left up to the implementer and may be Angular.
There wasn't a real agreement on how to start. Since it's not entirely worked out yet, one might need to experiment here. One proposal is, to start simple; the other direction was, to start with the most complex piece, "Start-Instance-Workflow". The latter might be a big complex to land during the next six months. Launch instance is known as a big issue though.
We agreed, we'll need documentation, tutorials for new contributors, and review guidelines. Richard Jones will follow-up on the OpenStack Developers mailing list.
UX
A new Launch instance design was proposed. We briefly discussed adding images for styling glance images.
Repo-Split
This is a longer going effort and required e.g unbundling embedded copies of JavaScript libraries (which is good anyways). We will need to freeze the code for a limited time. There are concerns about naming the separate parts. Aside from breaking dependent packages we will certainly confuse contributors and users with changing the name of openstack-dashboard to horizon and to rename former horizon to something else.
Kilo priorities
There are quite a few todo items left from the operators session, like:
- error message improvement
- filtering, search, and pagination in tables is still an issue
- documentation should become clearer, there are still topics not entierely covered in docs.
- inclusion of AngularJS will be a big task, views will be rewritten piece by piece
- Repo split
- blueprints will have to use a mandatory template in the future
- Ironic is now integrated in OpenStack, but currently does not have any representation in Horizon