Polymer as an alternative to Dojo for the Trigger Online Software

The human interfaces to Trigger Supervisor applications are built in the form of web applications, which is achieved with Dojo and C++ code. Dojo is a JavaScript library that allows users to define custom widgets (text boxes, buttons, sliders...), thereby extending basic HTML functionality. The following example creates a slider using nothing but a standard <div> tag and JavaScript: <div dojoType="slider"></div> This has been serving the project for quite some time, but some issues have been identified: • The Dojo library is very outdated (v0.4, 9 years old) and no longer maintained: • the risk of non-compatibility between the current TS GUIs and the browsers is very high, regardless whether they are used at the CMS control room or for development in general, • browsers are starting to put up deprecation notices for old Dojo code. Hence, TS GUIs are at risk of losing support for newer browsers as time passes. • Current C++ code is quite messy. Widgets can be defined, but the general layout of a page still needs to be generated in C++. • Mixing CSS, JavaScript, and HTML into C++ makes code difficult to read and maintain and invites bad practices Therefore an alternative was proposed. Known as the Polymer library. It gives access to new technologies and allows for a seamless transition as old code keeps working.