appium architecture overhaul

[Jonathan Lipps]

Hi Appium devs!

We've been working on a plan to modernize the Appium architecture. Your feedback and participation are welcome!

Check it out here: https://github.com/appium/appium/issues/5169

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Andreas Lüdeke]

Hey Jonathan,

just wanna ask if there are any plans to rework also the appium inspectors? From my experience they are an ice breaker for most appium users and an real advantage in contrast to e.g. calabash. Fortunately they are quite different (when comparing windows and osx) and not as handy as they could be.

Have you guys ever thought about an inspector like the selendroid one? web based, multiplatform and probably not conflicting with existing sessions?

BR

Andreas

[Jonathan Lipps]

Yes, new GUIs are on the roadmap. Probably won't be web-based but rather written in something like Electron (so essentially web technologies for the UI but a Node-based backend). This will allow easier interoperation with the Node code and open the projects up to more contributors, while remaining cross-platform "native" apps. 

This new GUI app is on the roadmap, but it has to come after the server improvements, and we haven't prioritized it in relation to, say, overhauling the documentation (IMO a much bigger issue than the inspectors not working) or upgrading the Android backend. So I don't have a specific ETA for it as of yet.

Jonathan

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[bootstrap online]

There have been talks about an Electron powered node.js rewrite for
the apps. I don't think anything has been decided though.
http://electron.atom.io/

[Jonathan Lipps]

Another nice thing about Electron is Appium could be a code dependency, i.e., the Electron app itself _is_ the server. So there wouldn't be the separation between Appium and the GUIs the way there currently is. Also completely removes the dependency on Node.js for the app since everything would be internal.

Anyway, it's something we want to pursue.

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/appium-developers/CAKnxNLy%3DX86CFS_q208jsavGgsiyx%3D8aZnTBBZNbPcHgN9DNXg%40mail.gmail.com.

[bootstrap online]

It'd be nice to have a high level roadmap that contains links to the
GitHub issues. TypeScript has a good example.
https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/wiki/Roadmap

Currently I'm aware of:
- Server improvements (issue 5169, 1.5 milestone)
- Overhaul documentation (no issue)
- Droiddriver android backend (issue 4869)
- Electron powered GUIs (no issue)
- New iOS backend (no issue)

I agree about using Electron. I'm glad it's on the roadmap.

> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/appium-developers/6143AC73-5E95-45AD-A649-A30734810325%40saucelabs.com.

[Andreas Lüdeke]

I just checked it out and it looks amazing. I am also using the OSx Slack client which seems to be build with it. Looks like the right choice.

[Jonathan Lipps]

here's the roadmap: https://github.com/appium/appium/blob/master/ROADMAP.md

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/appium-developers/37031f1e-0355-4a17-84aa-0c6d8fdd1da7%40googlegroups.com.

[Andreas Lüdeke]

great.

Did you actually considered for the rewrite to switch to an typed language like TypeScript/ES6? MIgration should be easy. Reading Node JS code is usually quite hard especially when no be familiar with the code. Having type support would help here.

[Jonathan Lipps]

We did consider it (there was an extremely long debate about the topic at the issue linked from the rewrite issue). It's something we might add in the future but decided to stick with non-typed JS for now. We are using ES6, but type annotations are not part of that version (they're in an earlier proposal stage still).

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/appium-developers/71d838f0-3285-496b-ac38-5970ac437e37%40googlegroups.com.