[wildfly-dev] The future of the management console

[Harald Pehl]

We're currently working on the next major version of HAL [1]. HAL.next will
include all features of the current management console plus many new features
such as macro recording, topology overview, better keyboard support and
PatternFly [2] compliance. See [3] for more details.

We're making good progress and have migrated all of the configuration and
half of the runtime screens to HAL.next. What's missing is the support for
patching and the remaining runtime UI. Our goal is to ship HAL.next with
WildFly asap. If you don't want to wait, I encourage you to try out HAL.next
today [4] and give us feedback!

I'd like to use this post to give you the chance to participate in the
future of the management console. We already have some basic ideas what
we would like to add to HAL.next, but we also want you to give us additional
input.

# Runtime Extensions / JavaScript API

As most of you will know both HAL and HAL.next are implemented in GWT.
For the current version there's a way to write extensions as GWT modules [5].
This is based on the concept of having compile time extensions provided as
maven dependencies. While this gives you full access to the HAL API, it's
often hard to get started for none GWT developers.

New features in GWT 2.8 like JsInterop [6] make it very easy to export parts
of your Java code to JavaScript. We've used this feature to provide a basic
JavaScript API. This can be used in the future to write runtime extensions
in JavaScript. A first draft is available at [7].

# Monitoring

The current management console has some limited monitoring capabilities.
We could improve and enhance these capabilities if this is something which
you want to have out of the box. However we don't want to turn HAL into
another monitoring tool. There are plenty of other tools and frameworks
which focus on monitoring.

# Macro Recording

We've built basic support to record macros in HAL.next. Behind the scenes the
DMR operations are collected and made available for replay. We could extend
this feature to be more dynamic if requested (variables, iterations, el al).

# What else?

It's your turn! What else do you want to see in HAL.next?


[1] https://github.com/hal/hal.next
[2] https://www.patternfly.org/
[3] https://github.com/hal/hal.next/#motivation
[4] https://github.com/hal/hal.next/#running
[5] https://hal.gitbooks.io/dev/content/building-blocks/extensions.html
[6] https://docs.google.com/document/d/10fmlEYIHcyead_4R1S5wKGs1t2I7Fnp_PaNaa7XTEk0/view
[7] https://github.com/hal/hal.next/wiki/JavaScript-API


-- 
Harald Pehl
hpehl at redhat.com