[FLINK-1938] Add Grunt for building the front-end

[vikhyat]

This is the first step towards implementing the web interface refactoring I proposed last year: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/stratosphere-dev/GeXmDXF9DOY

Once this is merged, I can get started with the rest of the refactoring. For now, the actual interface is kept the same, the only change is to how the build is done.

[vikhyat]

The build is failing because of the license checker (RAT) hanging, not sure why it's happening.

When building locally I get the same issue both on master as well as my topic branch. For testing I had to comment out the RAT section, does anyone know why this is happening?

[StephanEwen]

Wow, this comes with a bit of a surprise, given that it is a followup to a year-old discussion in the pre-Apache project "Stratosphere".
Because such a long time has passed since then, I have started bootstrapping some other work for an improved web frontend.

It consists of two parts:

1. A REST style backend that produces JSON structures with the information rendered by the frontend (lists of states, timestamps, names, counters, ...).
2. An angular.js based frontend, that is still much work in progress (someone else is helping me out there)

You can have a look at (1) here "https://github.com/StephanEwen/incubator-flink/commits/web_frontend_2" It supports queries for example like "http://localhost:8082/running//vertices" to get the vertex statuses for all vertices of a job. The nice thing is that it is extremely lightweight, by being a minimal layer on top of netty (which we use for data transport anyways). Before, I was trying to go for jersey/grizzly, but these are heavyweight (25+ dependencies) there were many version conflicts with other dependencies (like YARN).

I hope to be able to share a few screenshots for (2) on the mailing list next week.

How much have you implemented on your side? Can we find a way to bundle the two works together?

[vikhyat]

Sorry about that, I had given up on my last attempt because I couldn't figure out how to do the Maven-Grunt integration. After working on a few other Maven-based projects since then I figured I'd give it another shot.

I am sure we can bundle the two together, should I start working off the web_frontend_2 branch and send PRs to your fork instead? Is there anything specific you would want me to work on? I couldn't find any discussion on JIRA or the mailing list so I'm not sure how to proceed.

[StephanEwen]

You are definitely welcome to participate in the new web frontend development. Have a look at the branch I sent you and see if you find your way around the new code (it is not too much so far, so it is okay, hopefully).

I am not familiar with Grunt. It says it is a JavaScript automation framework. What is it for, in the context of the web frontend?

[vikhyat]

Grunt is basically a front-end build tool. It is useful for things like
concatenating and minifying JavaScript, precompiling templates etc. The
plugin I added also includes bower which can be used to import third party
dependencies like FontAwesome or jQuery instead of bundling them in the
repository.
On Apr 27, 2015 2:03 PM, "Stephan Ewen" notifications@github.com wrote:

You are definitely welcome to participate in the new web frontend
development. Have a look at the branch I sent you and see if you find your
way around the new code (it is not too much so far, so it is okay,
hopefully).

I am not familiar with Grunt. It says it is a JavaScript automation
framework. What is it for, in the context of the web frontend?

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