[users at bb.net] Creating an alternate web interface

[Ed Singleton]

On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 7:21 PM, Pierre Tardy <tardyp at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Ed,
>
> Indeed, buildbot nine has a much more modular UI. It is now possible to
> customize the UI and add new dashboards without forking buildbot.
> Is it easier to modify the UI when you have no webapp experience? I have
> to admit this is unfortunately not the case.
>

I'm fairly comfortable creating web interfaces onto rest api's, I've just
tended to do it in a more traditional manner.

I'm a Python developer not a JavaScript developer, but I do have some
experience of single page apps (and I've 'had a go' with most of the major
libraries).  Angular is low down on my list of preferences to work with.
It's very frameworky, and it kind of reminds me of how Django felt around
version 0.8.  Lot's of magic, and a difficulty curve that starts very low
but ramps quickly, requiring you to read the code to understand what it is
doing.

I would be very interested in knowing what you guys need in term of custom
> UI.
> This will help me to maybe provide better framework
>

Our use case is that non-technical users need to be able to fill in a form
with a few simple variables (start_date, end_date, version_number) and hit
submit.  Then they can go to a page and see whether the job has finished,
or errored.

Buildbot has been wonderful for the actual build process (especially
considering I had never used it before), and I'll never use Jenkins again,
but the UI isn't the greatest for non-technical users.  Particularly as now
that I have added triggered builds, this means there are multiple builders
on the builders page, which makes it hard for them to know which one is the
one they can actually 'force build'.

Considering that Builbot's main selling point for me (and the people I work
with) is it's customizability (otherwise we would have just stuck with
Jenkins), I think you might be best focusing on making it easy for people
to create their own custom UIs from scratch (and provide an okay experience
out of the box (which I think you already do)).  I switched to Buildbot to
get away from frameworkiness and plugins.

Yours gratefully

Ed
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