ok so I know I’m not the target audience here, but I woke up thinking “we just need to make the call and go with React because we NEED to get our API shipshape and fast”. Now I am not so sure.
I think your last experiment with the API ‘Concern’ is a critical thing - I would love to know devs opinions on whether this approach would be adding hideous overhead / complexity, or it might be a direction that a lot of people end up taking to keep the ‘API-first-ness’ of having a separate front-end framework whilst jumping onto the apparent significant advantages of Reactive Rails
A couple of quick questions, apologies if these are dumb questions:
- The speed at which everything is working in these pages is partially / significantly due to the simplicity of the app and the data being handled I think? So applying this approach isn’t going to magically speed up all of our pages?
- If things like Notifications and messaging are that simple can we just do them? Is there something that makes implementing that little Notifications thing vastly complex within current OFN that means we would need this new setup to do it? and if so WHYYYYYYYY (sobbing
- or is it just ‘priorities’? - It seems like some combo of this and an actual API-first approach might get us some big wins very fast. For example, if we had a good Enterprise endpoint that included a few bits of extra info, seems like we could be building pages that work like this very very quickly - getting major UX improvements on our discovery issues without the complex zapier / airtable / extension / wordpress workarounds we’re currently using to do this, and looking at replicating in other places like Canada
- Could we start doing some things within different ‘apps’ that appear seamless and as one to the OFN user - like the StartinBlox people talked about, and as I am increasingly coming to understand within the Shopify space? If we could, could some of those new apps be built within new framework without needing to do the whole rails upgrade on the whole app first? i.e. we could do Discovery app that’s like a plug-in? same question goes for
- Could we start work on the Product uplift rebuild in Reactive Rails but as a slightly separate but integrated app, that uses the API to CRUD product / variant options? That way we could a) start now, b) consciously and deliberately develop the API to do so which enables c) setting us up for all the other use cases where people want to manage their products and variants from outside OFN e.g. Connection with Odoo