The main purpose of Aikau is to provide a library of widgets that can be easily assembled into a web application for accessing a repository. The aim is not to replace Share but it was necessary to migrate away from its original implementation, which was based around the Surf paradigms of pages, templates, components and web scripts, towards a solution that provided for rapid development and customization.
While Share continues to be based primarily on the YUI library, Aikau is based around the Dojo library.
The main goals of Aikau are:
- Provide a library of fine-grained, decoupled widgets that completely encapsulate all of their function, styling and localization behavior.
- To make it easy to unit test those widgets across multiple browsers.
- To reduce the complexity of Surf rendered pages by removing Page, Template and Component configurations and replacing them with pages defined by an easily customizable JSON model in the JavaScript controller of a single web script.
- To be able to dynamically build pages both for and within the running UI and render them without restarting any servers.
- To provide a foundation on which our business partners and customers can build their own solutions.