AngularJS web UI is very old

Hi guys!

I’m learning now to use Duplicati and it seems to be brilliant piece of software. One thing I noticed has not been given enough love is the web UI. It appears the UI is based on the ancient AngularJS 1.4 and jQuery, while most part of it seems to be years and years old. Thus I have next questions:

  1. Is there any ongoing development of web UI apart from what I see in the main repo?
  2. Is there someone “responsible” for that part whom I can ask about the details?
  3. I have quite extensive experience with old AngularJS and with the modern Angular, do you think it would make sense to refactor/rewrite/redesign the UI?
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Welcome to the forum @afrishman

I doubt it. I don’t think there’s much expertise in the UI areas now. More would be hugely welcomed.
The current developers are working more on C# things, but priorities might also factor into the plan.
You can also look in About → Changelog to get an idea of what sorts of things are being worked on.

We’ll see if somebody stops by this topic. Some developers are more on GitHub. I’m not a dev here, however I can answer some questions (though more on the non-GUI parts than on the GUI code…).

If this gets serious we can try to get people in as needed, but some experts are highly unavailable…
Volunteers who can proceed fairly independently in some area (and there are many) would be great.
Sometimes someone will put a proposal on GitHub (different audience) and get more technical on it.

Beyond the smaller requests here (ideally in category UX or Features, or in GitHub), I’d highlight this:

Simple web UI design study

which also seems held up by lack of time, but if you are talking a major rewrite, there’s that proposal.
I am not a UI designer or implementer, so am the wrong person to ask about UI style. It’s quite an art.

From my limited understanding, modern Angular is not an easy port, so other directions are possible.
Vue was mentioned in a 2019 discussion, but I have no expertise in such things, so simply mention it.
Whatever is picked should probably keep both initial difficulty and ongoing maintenance ease in mind.

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Well, this pretty much answers all my questions! I see that @lhs_azevedo has already been working on this new UI solution in a separate repo. Would be really interesting to know what’s the progress