Refactor Scancode Workbench to React-Typescript
Overview
ScanCode Workbench provides an advanced visual UI to help you quickly evaluate license and other notices identified by ScanCode. ScanCode detects licenses, copyrights, packages and other interesting information in your code that can be visualised efficiently using workbench.
The GSoC project’s goal was to refactor ScanCode Workbench to a React + Typescript implementation and improve various sections of the application including Table view, file uploads, data sync across components, etc. Plus, the workbench wasn’t updated for a long time, to support the latest scans from scancode-toolkit, hence the schema and UI had to be changed accordingly.
Goals achieved
Refactor Workbench from vanilla javascript to React + Typescript implementation
Update Workbench to support the latest scancode-toolkit output format. (currently supports outputs from scancode-toolkit v31.1.1)
Improve User experience in Tableview, Home page, etc
Add convenience features like Drop files, History records, etc.
Add new sections for Scan Info, packages-dependencies info, etc
Automated releases using github actions (except for apple-silicon builds)
Quick look
Links
Post GSoC - Future Plans
I wish to carry on with the development of Scancode-workbench and implement the ideas suggested by my mentors. Workbench isn’t yet utilising all the scan data it imports, I wish to propose best ways to express this data. Moreover, with new release formats of scancode-toolkit, workbench must adapt and update its schema & UI at pace with scancode-toolkit.
Closing Thoughts
It was a great experience contributing to Workbench, Aboutcode team provided me with the freedom to implement UI improvements and suggested a lot of improvements throughout the journey. I learned a lot of things from working on an electron app to creating automated GitHub release scripts.
Heartiest thanks to @steven-esser @AyanSinhaMahapatra @TG1999 @pombredanne and all the About code members for your constant feedback and support over the course of the project.
To the reader, Have a look at aboutcode’s amazing projects. Surely you’ll find something to contribute that suits your preference
See ya 👋