Develop a new UI / frontend

[avivace]

The source of data is JSON, so it should be very feasible to have a proper frontend in VueJS or React rendering the results of the tests with proper filtering capabilities + responsiveness in a broader range of viewports. Possibly in another repository.

[Rangi42]

To keep this issue distinct from #46 and from other individual UI enhancement proposals, let's focus it on if/how to modify how the UI works, JS/framwework-wise.

I do think a whole framework, or even a component-based library like React, would be overkill for this repo, which is just one page that displays a big table. In an earlier period of web dev, JQuery would have been considered more than sufficient for "filtering a large table", and nowadays you don't need JQuery because the functionality is built into Javascript. As for "rendering the results of the tests", HTML works for that, and CSS is plenty capable of making it "responsive".

The main advantage of a JS-required framework/library, as far as I can tell, would be that our backend could just serve the JSON as-is, and let the client turn it into a site, no need for the Python code that writes out HTML. However, I think it would be simpler for us to refactor the existing Python code, so we have a clear set of functions for writing the HTML, and separately a loop over the JSON to apply those functions to the data.

Note, the filter behavior that the fork has so far can be seen at https://vulcandth.github.io/GBEmulatorShootout-vulc/.

[avivace]

Having a python script write fragments of HTML, iterating conditionally an already well formatted JSON data source is complex to read and touch and really unattractive to maintain/add feature to.

I don't want to ask potential contributors to learn this to be able to contribute on the frontend. It's really not accessible and stacking up cognitive load needed for a very simple task already solved by a myriad of tools/paradigms.

There are a lot of better ways to do this to and have readable and maintainable code as well, potentially rendering the full thing during build time if reactivity is what's scaring you.

We can port the existing improvements to the current system of course for the moment, we don't have to commit to a full rewrite of the frontend just yet.

[Rangi42]

Good points, that makes sense. I just want to avoid a framework becoming its own "complex to read and touch" thing that contributors have to learn. Any solution proportionate to its size as "one static web page" is fine with me.

[Rangi42]

(If we're changing how the Python code works, it would be nice to not specify emulators' URLs in two redundant places.)