PrettyZoo: Pretty Nice Zookeeper GUI

(github.com)

87 points | by vran_dev 1110 days ago

9 comments

  • jshmrsn 1110 days ago
    Looks pretty nice overall for sure. But, I would give the feedback that the non-uniform scaling of UI controls is a very uncommon animation behavior, and will feel out of place on any OS that I’m familiar with. In general, the animations feel a bit over eager and in the “for show” tuning instead of “clarify what state transition is happening” tuning. Generally when scaling large panels like that, you’ll want to not scale down below 60% and combine that with being at zero transparency at that scale so you can’t focus to clearly on the odd details of the scaled UI.
    • jshmrsn 1110 days ago
      Late edit: By zero transparency, I meant zero opacity. I.e., it'll start fading as it approaches approaches 100% scale from %60 scale. And not clarify, by non-uniform scaling, I'm referring to elements stretched in the X axis more or less than they are in the Y axis.
      • vran_dev 1109 days ago
        It's a very useful suggestions, thank you. I will make improvements based on your suggestions in future (i am not a professional ui developer, so i really need suggestions like this to do improvements)

        thank you again

        Best regards

      • greymalik 1109 days ago
        Do you have any references to recommend for learning heuristics like this? I want to create effective, useful visualizations but it’s not my area of expertise.
  • benreesman 1110 days ago
    It’s nice to see some ZK stuff on the front page. It’s not written in Go or part of Docker’s story or any other headline-grabbing thing, but it’s rock solid as these things go and is much more widely used (especially at companies with legitimate scaling problems) than you’d think from reading HN.
    • notum 1110 days ago
      This made me think of what the ultimate HN story title would be?

      Uber's shelved self-driving car LIDAR firmware written in Rust now available as a Docker package with a Kubernetes deployment script. Available on GitHub from an unknown FaceBook leak.

      Or...

      Why I stopped programming and turned to raising goats?

    • Dobbs 1109 days ago
      All of my experience says otherwise. I don't know the specifics because I'm not actively working on it but ZK is the cause of a lot of problems at current company.

      Additionally many years ago when I was investigating Zookeeper at previous company there were a number of fairly critical bugs that were unfixed in the mainline branch after having been reported years prior and patches provided. The solution was to find the Netflix or Etsy (I think?) fork and use those because they had merged in patches to fix things.

      We ended up going with raft because while it might not be as well tested as zookeeper it was actively being worked on so issues we would run into would have a chance of getting fixed.

    • fishnchips 1109 days ago
      YMMV. Having maintained ZK clusters I would hardly call it rock solid.
      • ericb 1109 days ago
        By design, ZK depends on continual network connections and heartbeats and it has to to provide the guarantees it provides. I wonder how much of "it is not rock solid" falls into "network flakiness" ?
        • fishnchips 1105 days ago
          Network, processes OOMing, individual machines going down because reasons. Reviving the ZK cluster each time felt like a brain surgery.
  • adamredwoods 1110 days ago
    I'm not a fan of big block 'success' messages that fade out. What if something distracts me or the timer concludes before I see the message?

    I prefer a success/failure log I can refer back to.

  • billfruit 1110 days ago
    The small amout of time I spent with JavaFX was productive, I wish it was more popular. It was a viable alternative to QT for cross platform desktop GUI apps, but I do get a feeling that its future is uncertain with it getting unbundled from the Oracle JDK. I don't really get why AWT and Swing get to be first class citizens of "core" Java while JavaFX which is the best approach to build GUIs in Java cannot be.
    • clangy 1110 days ago
      Just curious, what kind of software were you building with JavaFX? Was it for work or a side-project?

      I've been interested in JavaFX for a while. As you mentioned, the technology actually seems quite good. But I barely ever see or hear about it being used in the wild which worries me.

      • billfruit 1110 days ago
        It was for a side project. At work using JavaFX is of doubtful viability since hardly any developers seem familiar with it as opposed to QT.
    • muznar 1109 days ago
      I feel exactly the same. I loved JavaFX and I sometimes dream of an alternative universe where software never went to browser and always stayed on the desktop. JavaFX might have been the king.
  • Kaze404 1110 days ago
    It took me embarrassingly long to realize this isn't a software for managing a Zoo.
  • derN3rd 1110 days ago
    What kind of web based UI for ZooKeeper can you recommend?
  • justinc8687 1110 days ago
    I definitively thought this was software for managing animals in a zoo or something similar. Took me a while to figure out it was for something else...
  • realtalk667 1110 days ago
    i absolutely despise everything about this 'look'. the way the interface does that 'horizontal stretch' animation, the way the 'save success' is a huge green bar in the middle of the screen that you would no doubt see again and again and again, the way how everything is just text sitting in a giant field of empty white space.

    the feel of this stuff reminds me of way back when, maybe windows 95 era, when you would install some kind of OEM software from the manufacturer of the computer, and it would open up, and the software would look so busted, like there was MINIMAL effort whatsoever in making it look 'good', like they didn't have a graphics team and the person who coded the firmware had to do the graphics too at the last second. that feels like this stuff.