Page History

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• One UI technology must rule them all : Can we all come together to decide on a common technology framework that actually will meet all our needs?  Or are there actually separate needs / use cases that warrant the building of distinct UIs (similar to Hydra project)

Should we consolidate into a single, out-of-the-box UI? (Please VOTE!)

Given the benefits and disadvantages above, one thing seems abundantly obvious: We cannot reasonably expect to continue supporting two UIs with a single Committers team. Or to restate that, it is unreasonable to expect any Committer (who are all volunteers, working at their own jobs) to be well versed enough to support, maintain, develop and review fixes for multiple UIs simultaneously.  This is an obvious misuse of the volunteer resources provided. Each institution has already made their own personal decision on which UI they wish to use, yet we are essentially forcing some institution's developers (e.g. Committers) to also be knowledgable on the other UI (which they never use on a day to day basis).

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1. Open Source (required): Obviously. Also we need to avoid GPL and similar licenses which are incompatible with BSD.
2. Easy to run "out-of-the-box" (required): in keeping with DSpace Vision, any UI or UI framework must be easy to get running "out-of-the-box".
   
3. Ease of Branding/Theming (required): A User Interface should be easy for institutions of all sizes to brand or theme. This means even smaller institutions (without a full time DSpace developer) should be able to theme or brand DSpace with some amount of ease. At a minimum, things like the header/footer/color scheme and basic layout should be simple to modify or customize. Ideally, the UI would support third-party themes (e.g. Bootstrap themes from http://bootswatch.com/ or similar) which can be easily applied to the UI to change its entire look and feel.
4. Responsive Web Design (required) : a UI should be responsive and mobile-friendly, adapting to the size of various devices.
   1. Bootstrap support (recommended): Ideally, the UI would support Bootstrap, since it is one of the most widely used and supported responsive frameworks
5. HTML5 Support (required): a UI should be able to support HTML5.  Ideally, it is built primarily with HTML5 in mind, rather than only supporting some aspects of HTML5.
6. REST API friendly (highly recommended): a UI should be built with the idea of "separation of concerns".  For example, the UI framework should include NO business logic or Database query logic, etc. It should also have no knowledge of the underlying storage framework (e.g. Database schemas, file storage locations, etc).  Instead, ideally it would  communicate with DSpace primarily through the REST API (and other similar layers, e.g. Solr or Elastic Search). It would NEVER communicate directly with the database or other underlying storage layers.
7. Faceted/Filtered Search/Browse friendly (highly recommended):  a UI should easily integrate with a faceted/filtered search engine/server (such as Solr pr Elastic Search) or a generic API which can communicate with said faceted/filtered search engine (e.g. Discovery, Blacklight)
8. Rapid Development support / Developer friendly (highly recommended): a UI should be easy to develop against and improve upon. Ideally in a popular technology or language.  Local developers should not need to go through extensive training to work with the UI. The framework and technology ideally should be widely used, so that newer developers can also quickly come up to speed.  (Some examples: Ruby on Rails is a popular widely used technology/language. As is, seemingly, the Java Play! framework. Both are obviously much more widely used and easier to develop with than say Apache Cocoon)
9. Active, third party plugin ecosystem (highly recommended): a UI framework should ideally come with an active plugin/module/tool ecosystem. This is not only the sign of a strong community around the UI framework, but also eases the development burden on DSpace developers, as we no longer need to build all features specific to DSpace.  (For example, a UI framework that came with its own, third-party Authentication plugins would allow us to utilize that rather than building our own plugins for Shib/LDAP, etc)
10. Standard way of dealing with internationalization (i18n) or translations (required): DSpace has multiple international language communities who each manage their own set of translations for the interfaces. Migration from the current way of managing these translations to the new framework should be possible. Contribution of new translations should not be more difficult than it is today.
11. Java-friendly (recommended): DSpace's underlying framework & API is Java, and likely will remain Java. There are no plans to completely rewrite DSpace. However, this does NOT mean the UI needs to also be written in Java, but it may be best that the UI technology is Java-friendly or even in a language that is similar to or based off Java (e.g. Javascript, Groovy, even Ruby is similar enough).

UI

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Framework Analysis (Please add more!)

Here's a few possible UI frameworks which we may wish to analyze for a single future UI.  A much larger listing of various web application frameworks appears on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks

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