JGrapes Web Console 1.3.0

Overview

The Web Console components for the JGrapes framework provide the building blocks for a highly modular single page application, which can be easily adapted to different purposes.

The architecture can roughly be classified as a micro service driven micro frontend (with run-time integration via JavaScript), though it favors a common approach to styling for all components, which is unusual for most micro frontend architectures.

Web Console Demo

A JGrapes Web Console consists —from the user’s point of view— of a fixed frame with configurable content. The frame provides some means to add content (typically by using a dropdown menu) and to configure global settings such as the locale.

The content of the frame is provided by web console display components or “conlets” for short. These components typically support a summary or preview display that can be put on an overview panel in a dashboard style and a large view that is supposed to fill the complete frame. (They can also provide a “component content” which can be added to the page or used in other conlets. See Conlet.RenderMode for a complete list of rendering modes.)

Tabs or a menu in a side bar can be used to switch between the overview panel(s) and the large views of the different conlets.

Console Components

The SPA frame is provided by a class derived from ConsoleWeblet. If you like (or can live with) the Freemarker template engine, you should use FreeMarkerConsoleWeblet as base class. Using the latter class, all you have to do is implement the constructor and provide the required templates.

The project currently provides one SPA provider:

  • The VueJsConsoleWeblet implements the pursued approach for providing a JGrapes web console. It’s a bit of a misnomer because while it makes use of Vue.js as a library in order to generate the DOM for the SPA frame, it does in no way imply that Vue.js must or should be used by the conlets. It includes a stylesheet that follows the rules outlined in the section “Styling Conlets” below. This stylesheet can easily be replaced by some other stylesheet to get a completely different appearance. (Actually, it’s possible to derive a class from VueJsConsoleWeblet that only “overrides” the style sheet.)

There are two deprecated SPA providers in the project which are no longer maintained. They are kept as examples of how things can be done differently:

  • The JQueryUiWeblet provides the SPA frame using the jQuerUi widgets and styles. It is the earliest attempt to implement a JGrapes web console. It has been deprecated due to its dependency on jQuerUi.

  • The Bootstrap4Weblet uses Bootstrap 4 widgets and styles and assumes that conlets comply to this environment. Historically, it is the second attempt to implement a JGrapes web console and has been deprecated as well, because it doesn’t follow the principles outlined below in the section “Styling Conlets”.

The SPA frame consist of the HTML for the basic page layout and JavaScript code for communicating with the server and managing the content. To simplify the implementation, package org.jgrapes.webconsole.base includes the JavaScript classes Console and Renderer.

Class Console provides methods that are independent of a particular front-end implementation such as establishing and maintaining a websocket connection with the server.

Class Renderer provides methods that simplify the implementation of a specific front-end.

Styling Conlets

At least for simple conlets, it should be possible to use them in differently styled consoles. This requirement implies that conlets are styled independent of a particular CSS framework.

Traditionally, CSS frameworks are “invasive” in the sense that the framework’s presentation classes (and even worse, additional divs) spread all over your HTML. Only a few “lightweight frameworks” such as Picnic base their styling on the native HTML. The problem is that even semantic HTML 5 doesn’t provide enough context to reliably style GUI widgets. If however, you add WAI-ARIA attributes to the markup (as you should anyway), it turns out that almost all styling can be based on the HTML without adding presentation classes.

Using “ARIA augmented semantic HTML” is therefore the preferred approach for authoring conlets. You can find more about this approach in the overview of the project’s Vue component library. Combined with a web console’s CSS stylesheet that uses rules based on this kind of content this approach should lead to satisfactory results in typical cases.

Implementation Notes

Dynamic modularity for the SPA

Web applications are nowadays mostly developed as modular application. However, the modularity focuses on the code base. The various modules are then bundled by some tool and provided as monolithic resources. Optimization steps in this process may even remove JavaScript code from libraries if analysis shows that it isn’t invoked, thus making libraries only partially available.

The JGrapes web console objectives include the support for dynamic addition of conlets. Adding a conlet to a running system may require adding resources on the server side as well as in the SPA. The server side can easily be handled by a framework such as OSGi. Support in the SPA turns out to be a bit more difficult to implement.

Dynamically adding CSS

This can be implemented by adding additional link nodes to the head node in the DOM with JavaScript. The added links cause the browser to load the respective style sheets. Style sheets are applied as they become available, so the asynchronous loading may, in the worst case, result in a visible change of the pages’ appearance after its initial display.

Adding link nodes in the SPA is triggered on the server side by firing AddPageResources events.

Dynamically adding JavaScript

If everybody used ES6 modules, this wouldn’t be a problem either. An import statement in ES6 JavaScript causes the interpreter to block until the required module has been loaded. If ES6 modules aren’t used, we have to resort to adding a script node to the head node in the DOM. In this case the application has to make sure that required resources are loaded before the requiring JavaScript.

In the JGrapes web console, the necessary dependency tracking and ordered insertion of the script nodes is handled by a class that obtains the required information from ScriptResource instances as described in AddPageResources.

I180n support

The currently selected language is maintained in the lang attribute of the html element. The renderer implementation must provide some UI element that allows the user to modify the value of the lang attribute. Whenever the value of the attribute is changed, the server must be notified by calling setLocale.

In response, the server fires a SetLocale event which is handled by the console weblet and all contlets. Depending on the implementation on the client side, the console weblet (or a conlet) can trigger a full reload of the page. Assuming that the SPA frame can adapt to a change of language without reload, a conlet can trigger a reload of its representations (the default behavior of onSetLocale as implemented by AbstractConlet) or do nothing if its representation can also adapt to a change of the lang attribute dynamically.

Component Packages

The web console components are based on the core framework and components.

Package hierarchy

org.jgrapes.webconsole.base
Components for building web consoles. Make sure to read this package’s description first.
Packages
Package
Description
 
 
 
 
 
 
A web console component for displaying markdown text in a web console.
 
A web console component for displaying system information in a web console.
Provides the components for building web consoles based on the core, io and http packages.
The events used by the web console related components.
Classes for implementing a freemarker based web console component.
Provides a web console weblet that implements the web console page using the Bootstrap 4 framework.
This package provides a sample web console configuration which can be used for testing and demonstration purposes.
Provides a web console weblet that implements the web console page using the JQuery UI framework.
The events used by the jQuery UI web console.
Themes packages.
The base theme for the web console.
Provides a component for adding the Browser Require library to a web console.
Provides a component for adding the Chart.js library to a web console.
Provides a component for adding the datatables library to a web console.
Provides a component for adding the Fontawesome free web font to a web console.
Provides a component for adding the Fork-Awesome free web font to a web console.
Provides a component for adding the Gridstack.js library to a web console.
Provides some vue components used in but independent of the Vue.js web console which may also be of interest when implementing web console components.
Provides a component for adding the jquery library to a web console.
Provides a component for adding the jQueryUI library to a web console.
Provides a component for adding the jQuery UI Touch Punch library to a web console.
Provides a component for adding the Lodash library to a web console.
Provides a component for adding the moment library to a web console.
Provides a component for adding the markdownit library to a web console.
Provides a component for adding the moment library to a web console.
Provides a component for adding the Vue.js library to a web console.
Provides a component for adding the old vue.js 2 library to a web console.
Provides a component for adding the Vuex library to a web console.
Provides a simple role based access control using information from the configuration support provided by JGrapes.
Provides a web console weblet that implements the main page using the Vue.js library.