Qvain

Qvain is the metadata editor for the ATT project. It has a front-end written in Javascript and back-end written in Go. This repository contains the javascript front-end.

The user frontend uses the minimal Vue library to update the DOM and its official Vue-router component to handle different steps of the editing process. The application is written in ES6 (also called ECMAScript 2015), the latest standard of Javascript, and packaged into a bundle for the browser by webpack and babel.

Prerequisites & dependencies

Services:

Schema service: Qvain needs a schema to build its metadata input interface from; this schema comes from the iow service
ATT id/login service: the Qvain frontend doesn't handle login, it expects a JSON web token to assert the user's identity, which the backend provides

Build for development

To run the application for development on localhost, run the npm serve script:

$ npm run serve

... and open a browser window at http://localhost:8080/.

Building dist packages

To build packages that can be uploaded to a server, run the npm build script:

$ npm run build

... it will build and package files into ./dist. The contents of this directory is what your production web server should serve.

Releasing a version

To release a version, forcefully add the ./dist folder as it is ignored by default and either tag or commit:

$ npm run build
$ git add -f dist/
$ git tag -a v0.8.0 -m "Release 0.8.0"
$ git push -v

Validator

Qvain contains a json-schema validator (sub) package in the vendor/ directory. The validator has its own test suite based on Mocha and node's assert:

$ cd vendor/validator
$ npm test

Browser support

Qvain is a modern SPA web application written in ES6 (anno 2015) compliant Javascript and transpiled by Webpack and Babel. The build process creates two bundles: a faster and smaller one with modern ES6 Javascript for browsers supporting Javascript modules – all of the current self-updating browsers – and a slower and larger bundle with code transpiled to ES5 with optional polyfills for old browsers, in an attempt to support those people stuck with old browsers such as IE11.

Note that because Qvain depends on Vue and Bootstrap 4, it is very unlikely to work on versions of Internet Explorer older than IE10.