Objectives

Areas of Concern:

• Code Structure

• Performance standards

• Flexibility and extensibility

• Features: currently available features and integration in future state

Goals

• Ease of development
• "Componentize" the application 
• Responsive application
• Improve performance
• Improve build process
• Separation of presentation layer from business layer

App Stability

• The general code structure of the site is sound.
• The usage of JavaScriptMVC framework has allowed for an organized structure for the code.
• Third party software integration have in the majority of scenarios is working well with current structure
• Some good coding practices and documentation but implemented inconsistently

Areas of improvement

• Low performance due to excessive I/O requests
  • ​Total: 137 request, 3.0 MB 
    • ​fast connection - 25.26s, slow connection - 3.7mins
    • Documents: 4 requests 7.7KB
    • Stylesheets: 34 requests 99.4KB
    • Images: 14 requests 108KB
    • Scripts: 52 requests 2.7MB
    • XHR: 26 requests ~60KB
    • Fonts: 2 requests 59.5KB

Areas of improvement (continued)

• Too many third party software.

• Embedded logic inside the javascript which creates tightly coupled code

• The CSS of the site is a bit fractured and verbose. 34 separate CSS files is not a good idea.

• No offline solution. Pinging the server every 200ms for availability only results in a chatty application. In return, we should consider an offline approach.

• Currently the application is a single page application. Should we continue down this path in the future? Can the application be re-assembled as separate modules?

Areas of improvement (continued)

• There is a heavy reliance on jQuery. This reliance is also to multiple versions of jQuery.
• Testing framework for the front end.
• Excessive logging. Add proper logging only when needed and reduce the logging in production environment
• There seems to be some sparse documentation. 
• Build system for the front end(not one existing)
• There is no usage of modern development tools i.e. Bower, Grunt or Gulp, Yeoman, and RequireJS as just a few examples.
• The UI Layout does not take advantage of any grid layout.
• Poor CSS structure.

architecture & Framework issues

Lethargic development cadence resulted from:

• Age of the current JavaScript framework and libraries
• Heavy reliance on Grails for:
  • Initial server side templating
  • Portions of the presentation logic
  • Testing
  • Build and deployment

• Tightly coupled front end with back end and Grail technology:
  • ​Usage of lighter or more customizable web servers like NodeJS or NGinx
  • Bower and NPM for package management
  • Grunt or Gulp for task management

architecture & Framework issues

architecture & Framework issues

A monolithic application

Disadvantages of a monolithic application

•  Tightly coupled front end with the back end. 

• Restrictive infrastructure

• Any change in the system will require a build and deploy of the entire system

• Single point of failure

• Scaling of the system require the cloning of the entire system

architecture & Framework issues