:date: 2018-01-16

=========================
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
=========================


Alternatives for the ExtJS UI
=============================

I read Robert Warmack's post `Trends in Web Technologies – A Survey of
Development Professionals
<https://www.sencha.com/blog/trends-in-web-technologies/>`__.  Yes
that's good work, and I especially like when he writes "One of the
stand-out data points of this survey is that 79% of desktop apps are
expected to be in use for three years or more" because it shows that
Lino is in the right direction.  But I am disappointed because I am
waiting for other news.  Lino's first choice user interface is based
on Sencha's ExtJS.  We continue to believe in this technology, and our
Lino sites will continue to use it for the years to come.  But we are
increasingly worried because there are still no news about Sencha's
engagement for the free software community.  Their continued ignoring
us forces us to start looking for alternatives.

Yesterday en passant I introduced Hamza to the issues
:ticket:`278` (NPAPI plugins don't work on Chrome version 42 and higher),
:ticket:`1377` (Use web-based protocol handlers) and
:ticket:`2089` (Use custom browser protocol instead of davlink).
He asked "Is it possible that the problem doesn't exist with `Node.js`?".

Some week ago Eric recommended to rather look into "Materialize design
toolkits and frameworks".  This morning I read `a blog post
<https://www.techiediaries.com/django-react-forms-csrf-axios/>`__
about how to handle the Django CSRF token in *React* when using the
*Axios* client.

So now I started :ticket:`2260` (Materialize, Node.js and Angular).
Maybe Tonis and I should investigate a bit more before continuing with
:ticket:`2245` (Diving into OpenUI5).

I sometimes feel like some part of a `launch vehicle
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_vehicle>`__ hoping to reach
outer space and not knowing whether I'm in the payload or on a carrier
rocket...



Sphinx 1.7 beta is out
======================

Takeshi Komiya announced:

    We just released 1.7.0b1.
    It includes much of improvements. And we believe it will help you.

    In detail, please see CHANGES:
    https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/blob/1.7.0b1/CHANGES

    Since this is a beta release, we expect that you may encounter bugs.
    If you find a bug, please report it on github issues:
    https://github.com/sphinx-doc/sphinx/issues

I tested it on my projects.  Note that :cmd:`pip install -U sphinx`
didn't install it, so I pulled the github repo and used :cmd:`pip
install -e`.  (I didn't know that I could have used pip's `--pre
<https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/reference/pip_install/?highlight=pre#pre-release-versions>`__
option: :cmd:`pip install --pre -U sphinx` does the job as
well. Thanks to Shirou for pointing it out.

It worked flawlessly, except for a problem when building :ref:`book`::

   SphinxWarning: /book/docs/specs/cal.rst:1010:duplicate object description of lino_xl.lib.cal.Plugin, other instance in /book/docs/api/lino_xl.lib.cal.rst, use :noindex: for one of them

No, I cannot "use :noindex: for one of them" because my document
structure is based on the asumption that autodoc ignores members that
have no docstring.  For example the page which documents the
:mod:`lino_xl.lib.cal` module is automatically generated, but it must
not contain a definition for :class:`lino_xl.lib.cal.Plugin` which has
a prosa description in :ref:`book.specs.cal`.

It took me some time to find the reason.  I first searched for
`autodoc-process-docstring` and `autodoc_default_flags` but could not
find any explanation.  I tried to add ``'no-undoc-members'``, no
change.

The explanation was that Sphinx didn't consider the docstring as
empty because it took the docstring of the parent class.

The "guilty" is therefore a new configuration setting
`autodoc_inherit_docstrings` which default value is `True`.  I fixed
my problem by setting it to `False`.



Avanti
======

I continued to work on :xfile:`final_report.body.html` and checked in
my current version.  It's already beautiful and promising, but
tomorrow I will continue before showing it to Johanna.