front end refresh

[gubuntu]

Gavin: The testing site is quite clunky and slow and does page reloads in situations where it should be doing more ajaxy behaviour.

Mohab: the most obvious two places need ajax calls are the facets (filters like organizations, SASDI themes ...) and spatial search, all of this is a result of using ckan javascript modules, take these ckan-based sites for similar behaviour (the U.S. Government's Open Data https://catalog.data.gov/dataset, Berlin open data https://daten.berlin.de/datensaetze, swiss open data (slightly better one for server conditions i assume, it still reload the page) https://opendata.swiss/en/dataset , Mexican open data https://datos.gob.mx/busca/dataset , )
changing implementation of parts that comes out of the box with CKAN -like CKAN facets which controls the filters, and make calls to solr then reload the page with the results - meant investing in CKAN core which is/was out of discussion.
the spatial search is specially slow because we don't modify the plugins and rather inject them as dependencies (an early requirement was not to modify anything beside EMC logic), spatial search doesn't support boundaries meant waiting for the map to load and applying boundaries to it, and spatial search also reloads the page the same way as facets.
after all newer frameworks like React, Vuew ..etc. shine for these reasons, unless we separate the UI from backend (i.e using CKAN as a backend only and call it's APIs while the whole Front end is handled with other frameworks) it won't feel fresh