WebUI Rewrite?

[Magentah]

As has been discussed in Discord a bit, I think that it's worth thinking about a potential rewrite of the WebUI site. My main motivation for this is (honestly) that I don't like PHP and don't want to use it, and it seemed like there wasn't much development happening, so some development in technology I enjoyed would be better than none in PHP.

However, it seems there's a number of people who are still interested, so I thought it's worth having this here rather than purely in discussions on discord so it's somewhat easier to keep track of things.

So, if we were to rewrite, the main benefit would be the possible introduction of some more modern web development technologies, such as front-end frameworks (Angular, React or Vue), css preprocessors (SASS or LESS), testing (Karma, Protractor, Jasmine, Chai, etc), and probably others I'm forgetting.

If this is something that were to happen, there'd be some additional considerations as well:

• What structure should be used - should there be a web server, what functionality would be on the web server or segs_server, separate authentication or not, etc.

• What changes would need to be made to segs_server or libraries used (jcon-cpp would need to be changed to support secure websockets, for example)

• Which language, if any, for the web server?

  • Python
  • PHP
  • Ruby
  • NodeJS
  • C# with .NET Core
  • Other

• Which framework, if any, would be used for the web server

  • Ruby - On Rails
  • PHP - Laravel, Symfony
  • Python - Django, Flask
  • NodeJS - Express, Meteor
  • .NET Core - MVC?
  • Other

• Which framework, if any, would be used for the front-end

  • Angular
  • React
  • Vue
  • Other

• Which additional frameworks, if any, should be considered

  • Angular comes with RxJS
  • Angular and React both use TypeScript
  • Libraries for parsing json
  • Etc

• Styling - Themes, Color Scheme

• Will need to make Installation, Configuration and Theming as easy as possible, really.

Comments, Ideas, Changes, Other things to consider?