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

[Greg MacDonald]

There was a CORS issue, which was fixable, but I had issues using the datamodule from a separate machine. Buildbot isn’t configured out of the box for that scenario. Here’s the mailing list thread about it:

http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.buildbot.user/103

I’m really liking angular and coffeescript. It’s very different; more functional less OOP, but enjoyable and a nice change of pace.

-Greg

From: Ed Singleton [mailto:singletoned at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 23, 2016 3:14 AM
To: Pierre Tardy
Cc: Greg MacDonald; users at buildbot.net
Subject: Re: [users at bb.net] Creating an alternate web interface

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