Hey everyone,
The front end of Catalog was constructed mostly in a JavaScript (JS) framework called Ember that was popular around the time Catalog was originally being built. Ember has some inherent downsides that can make it difficult for our engineers to work with, and we would like to eventually move Catalog over to a more modern framework called React. This will happen over time.
This is potentially impactful for Catalog users who are using custom JS in the admin portion of Catalog. If you’re not using custom JS, the changes will go largely unnoticed. To help those who are using custom JS, I want to outline our strategy for making this change.
Going forward, any feature work that we do on a particular page in Catalog will begin with us rebuilding that page in React. For example, we are planning on adding a date range filter to the reports page, as well as make individual Catalog reports exportable. Before these features will be added, we’ll be rewriting that page in React.
Rewriting Catalog in React will pay big dividends going forward. It allows us to much more easily add new features down the road as well as use assets from Canvas, thereby improving consistency between the two platforms and further speeding up development.
I’ll post in the community whenever a page rewrite is coming. For regions where a beta is available, the rewrite will be on beta for 3 weeks before going to production. The first of these changes is going to beta as part of the March 11th release, which will be a rewrite for the revenue report pages.
Again, for most customers this as well as future rewrites will happen transparently.
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