[Hawkular-dev] Dynamic UI PoC Presentation

[Heiko Rupp]

On 17 Jul 2017, at 15:59, Caina Costa wrote:

> If we have a WildflyDomainControllerServer to render, first it will 
> try to find WildFlyDomainControllerServerView, then

I (still) consider that a problem, even if better than what we have now.
I can't tell e.g. the Infinispan folks "Listen you know your stuff 
better than we do, so please start writing Ruby code and create a 
pull-request against the hawkular-provider gem"

My goal really is to externalise that as much as possible (in to the 
hawkular-server or agent side), so that it is
possible for other groups to write the description in e.g. JSON for 
their UI and the relation between Entities.

Having that in Hawkular/Agent also allows us to introduce new supported 
stuff outside the release cycles of ManageIQ and their downstream 
CloudForms.
I am not even sure if e.g. introducing support for Infinispan could be 
part of a z-Stream release, which is supposed to be bugfixes only.
So if we'd miss CF 4.6 GA, we can only support Fuse in the CF release 
after 4.6 GA, while if the UI is driven from (meta)-data on the Hawkular 
side, we can update the Middleware Manager / agent and the support would 
show automagically.
Of course we may at some point in time create more specific UIs for some 
task, but the 80% case should work without modification of MiQ code.

We need to generate the views dynamically, by fetching the (meta) data 
and the schema and generating the view from that. That means we don't 
need to change anything on ui-classic to add new entity types.
Those *EntityView Ruby objects need to be created from data retrieved 
from the Hawkular side and not by checking in new code into the 
hawkular-provider gem when supporting new Entities.

The metadata should probably stored inside MiQ for faster access, but 
that is a 2ndary concern.