I think that this would be an excellent move.

The change should also be looked at in relation to making the EPrints interface a bit more HTML5-y – less tables (except where tabular data is being presented) and more id’s, classes, input field validations.

The jQueryUI components would allow some very quick and easy colour ‘skinning’ to be done.

I’ve never delved that deeply into the current EPrints _javascript_, and don’t know how big a challenge this would/will be.

Can it be broken down into parts, or should we try and work out if there’s some good ‘wins’ to be had e.g.

The current workflow rendering as tabs across the screen feels a bit inefficient.

I’d prefer to see the workflow stages rendered as a set of accordians, each with some form of ‘completeness’ measure – maybe a tick if everything is OK, a cross if something is definitely wrong and a warning if that stage is incomplete?

Cheers,

John

From: eprints-tech-bounces@ecs.soton.ac.uk [mailto:eprints-tech-bounces@ecs.soton.ac.uk] On Behalf Of sf2
Sent: 07 October 2013 16:23
To: eprints-tech@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Subject: [EP-tech] EPrints and jQuery

Hi all,

EPrints has been using the Prototype JS library since version 3 - at the time there was as many good reasons to use Prototype than to use jQuery but now it seems that the latter has been more widely adopted.

Migrating to jQuery is not simple. Most if not all the EPrints _javascript_ extensions rely on Prototype one way or another, as well as a number of core UI components/plug-ins so a migration would mean re-writing many core components and it would also break some of your custom code.

However using jQuery comes with many advantages including jQuery UI and its widely used UI components (read http://jqueryui.com/ for more information) and it would make sense to move towards jQuery in the next major/long-term release of EPrints.

What are your views about this potential move?

Seb.