Java or Everything Developer loving this project

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trangtrainam
Posts: 1
Joined: 06 Jan 2020, 02:55

Java or Everything Developer loving this project

Post by trangtrainam »

Hi all,

This message is specially intended to @rednoah, not much experience with forums so sorry for sloppiness writing here.

I am a Java developer loving this software. I've been using it and following it for the last year, and it is an amazing product (yes, I consider it a product). I don't how you manage to spend so much time and dedication on it.

I am only using the CLI version, as I am building an all-in-one tool for media download automation and organization. There are a lot out there: SickBeard, CouchPotato, Sonarr... but I haven't found anything that does everything (manually search or automated search, pick, download, rename, fetch subtitles, copy or move to filesystem, refresh mediacenter or even prepare for streaming) in a single web app without touching a single config file or being lost in tens of config screens. It will take time, but I am willing to have this and install it in a RPi, desktop, cloud... code once, run everywhere. I don't have a lot of time, it goes slow, something already working.

But well, I would like to ask you something about this project:

- Have you considered moving the whole codebase to github? Maybe you don't need it, but I would consider to contribute. SVN and patches are out of my scope right now...
- What's the future of filebot-node? Is it a specific feature for Synology?
- About filebot-node, can I ask why ExtJS? My company is highly regretting having something like that in the frontend, as it very very difficult to maintain...
- Have you ever thought about moving to a web-based application approach? I know most of the users use the app as a Windows Desktop, but that can still be supported. The advantage of having a webapp would be a run-everywhere approach and use the browser, also embedding webserver options are now fully supported and nice.

Hope you find this somehow interesting or sorry to bother you with off-topic questions!

Thank you for the software, the effort and the dedication!
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rednoah
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Joined: 16 Nov 2011, 08:59
Location: Taipei
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Re: Java or Everything Developer loving this project

Post by rednoah »

trangtrainam wrote: 10 Jan 2020, 09:04 - Have you considered moving the whole codebase to github? Maybe you don't need it, but I would consider to contribute. SVN and patches are out of my scope right now...
FileBot was born as a personal open-source project:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/filebot/

Although many have contributed in terms of testing and requesting features, and FileBot wouldn't be what it is today without users making sensible suggestions for improvement, there was never even a single viable 3rd party patch, let alone a long-term committed 3rd party developer. It's just not 1970 anymore. Software Development is a respectable profession now, and not a hobby. If you're a skilled developer, then you probably have a job and a life. ;)

trangtrainam wrote: 10 Jan 2020, 09:04 - What's the future of filebot-node? Is it a specific feature for Synology?
FileBot Node has no future. There is however a bright present, and it'll probably stick around maintained-but-unchanged for a long time.

trangtrainam wrote: 10 Jan 2020, 09:04 - About filebot-node, can I ask why ExtJS? My company is highly regretting having something like that in the frontend, as it very very difficult to maintain...
FileBot Node was conceived with Synology DSM in mind. But since the Synology DSM UI doesn't actually have an API for UI extensions (it has iframes) the thing turned out rather platform-independent in the end. ExtJS was chosen because Synology DSM uses ExtJS.

FileBot Node never become more than a thin amc script wrapper because ExtJS development is torture and not interesting at all. Then again, when is web development ever not torture if you do anything other than pure HTML/CSS and was there a "correct" web development framework in 2015 to begin with?

trangtrainam wrote: 10 Jan 2020, 09:04 - Have you ever thought about moving to a web-based application approach? I know most of the users use the app as a Windows Desktop, but that can still be supported. The advantage of having a webapp would be a run-everywhere approach and use the browser, also embedding webserver options are now fully supported and nice.
Yes, I have thought about it. It would be a monumental amount of work, and the only business reason I can think of is curbing piracy, but that'd be like squatting a fly with an atomic bomb. It's probably not a good idea. Not quite worth the effort, and bad for everyone.

Maybe in a few years (or decades) when GraalVM can compile all of FileBot (including native dependencies) to Wasm, and when browsers can read/write to the local file system (on second thought, maybe not such a good idea?), when it's "just" a matter of rewriting the UI with some fancy new framework where everything is easy, then maybe.

Anything is possible, and if we give GraalVM and Flutter a few more years, then maybe at some point things won't even be that hard, but right now, I don't really have the extra 10000 hours to make it work, and my time is better spent on the needs of the many. ;)
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