Re: [xwiki-devs] Experiment with AngularJS and XWiki

Hi, I've been experimenting with AngularJS and XWiki and I find the two technologies are a pretty good fit. You can see a demo of some AngularJS taking to an XWiki backend: The extension is here: http://extensions.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Extension/AngularJSDemo A demo is here: http://www.ludovic.org/xwiki/bin/view/Phones/AngularSearch What I like a lot about AngularJS is the template approach while still being able to bind dynamic behavior and the fact that there is no backend compile making it a great fit for integration in XWiki pages. The demo is a angularJS screen right in an XWiki page. The controler could have been written as a JS Extension but in the demo it is also in the same page. The controler is calling both LiveTable JSON pages and REST pages to retrieve individual documents. XWiki's current REST apis are far from optimal to quickly retrieve the needed information to display as I had to configure 3 requests to get the page information, the main object and the attachment list. However with AngularJS this was very transparent as you did not need to chain the requests. Now if would be better if we improved our REST apis with that type of framework in mind. I've long thought that our REST system lacks the flexibility we have with XWiki pages. If we want to have the same flexibility with AJAX development and use and improve our REST apis instead of writing additional APIs in XWiki pages, then we need an easy way to extend or override existing REST apis. This could be achieved using Groovy Scripts that the REST api can dynamically load. These groovy script your replace, add or extend existing APIs. The example of the LiveTable is a very good example of the lack of flexibility/speed the development of additional REST apis represent. If we had had that flexibility the livetable backend code could be written as REST apis and not as an XWiki page. This is something we need to fix in our development model if we want to be a good Javascript UI citizen. We could push this type of integration way further providing an XWiki service for AngularJS which would simplify reading XWiki data and transforming it to the right objects for using in AngularJS templates. We could also provide additional filters and features for editing. In any case I believe this is something we really need to look into more in the future as the embedding works quite well and the angular JS development model fits the XWiki one quite well. It has the same "visual" aspect as velocity development but in Javascript with the additional dynamicity. WDYT ? Ludovic