Proxmox Announces Proxmox Datacenter Manager | Hacker News Reader

Proxmox Announces Proxmox Datacenter Manager

forum.proxmox.com

30 pointsLorenDB14 comments

It's an early alpha; the bigger news hidden within is our new Rust/Yew based web framework called proxmox-yew-widget-toolkit [0], it will allow us to move away from ExtJS (where the backing company seemingly forgot that they used to be open source) and go full in on Rust in the frontend too; it really is a breath of fresh air!

https://git.proxmox.com/?p=ui/proxmox-yew-widget-toolkit.git...

If you got any question feel free to ask.

Really interesting, thanks for letting us know. There hasn't been a lot of new about this (not that I've been looking that long), is there a place to follow up on these developments, a roadmap of sorts?

Edit: Misread, thought this was about the "normal" Proxmox web UI. Any plans to make that Rust based?

  > is there a place to follow up on these developments, a roadmap of sorts?

For PDM there is a roadmap [0] for the new widget toolkit there isn't such a single documents, but an initial whitepaper (well simple markdown-formatted text to provide some background and examples).

For development, you can follow on the mailing lists [1] or use our public inbox interface [2] for them, yew-devel is for the web framework/widget toolkit and pdn-devel is for, well, PDM.

  > Any plans to make that Rust based?

Spelled out, detailed and actionable plan? No. On the long-term roadmap? Yes, definitively.

[0]: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Proxmox_Datacenter_Manager_Road...

[1]: https://lists.proxmox.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo

[2]: https://lore.proxmox.com/

"It's 1990, time to get ugly. [Pre-Chorus 2] Should be a crime to be that ugly." https://youtu.be/CroETQY51J4

Just for the record, you cannot go in my headset with that UX

[Kids who have been playing with Proxmoxx for the past decade face serious competitive threats from a new generation that will NOT recommend product$ that look like 1980s industrial control systems just because some geek tells them it doesn't require giving money to a boomer in Redmond that they never cared less about. https://youtu.be/ru3gH27Fn6E ]

Maybe try Godot and see what you can put together over the holidays! If you don't, be someone else will..

I'm not sure what to get from this comment, are you sure you checked out the actual new interface? There's a screenshot here: https://pve.proxmox.com/mediawiki/images/7/76/Pdm-alpha-0.1....

> Maybe try Godot and see what you can put together over the holidays! If you don't, be someone else will..

Godot is a game engine written in C++ and thus just not relevant for our use case, which is to have a web framework using native web technology to leverage the accessibility progress made there over the last decades and being written in Rust.

Yes, as a computer scientist with almost a half century of experience, I get your product, UX, why you made certain decisions, what made ExtJS popular, why people choose Proxmox, etc. I even get how much of an ask it is of someone who chose ExtJS back in the day to now consider shifting gears to build a 3D interactive simulation in Godot to be the new control plane for Proxmox. Your current users will be satisfied with the status quo and you have great near-term sales potential continuing to knock off the dying VM company many of us knew and once loved. [Heck, I just got a Christmas eCard from Ashwood Computer (MultiValue/PICK databases) in 2024...I'mma send 'em https://youtu.be/R-BT2yzXP8w in reply.] However, I again caution that the (massive) generation that is about to suddenly replace the current techs that you have supported for the past decade will NOT be satisfied at all with your current value-ad, which is ultimately a forms-based user interface and packaging of functionality defined by the soon dead VM company and the underlying open source projects of the Linux operating system. As far as your use of native web technology, there's Web3D and X3D if you like to remain platform agnostic (a myth because the web standards are fully controlled by the platforms), but those standards require a real financial commitment over simply downloading Godot (which has improving Web export) and building your datacenter control-panel "simulation" (because a "game" is a type of "simulation"). If you also have a worthy agenda to "use more Rust", then there are some projects on Github to use Godot from Rust too. While re-thinking, it is wise to include a basic AI-agentic interface and an embedded LLM to allow fielding natural language queries and out of band notifications on the state of the control plane.

[Also, I pasted the wrong PWEI video to support that lyric in my original comment that tried to soften the blow of my opinion of your user interface https://youtu.be/mLoQueaCLqA .. this "minimalist is so cool" website doesn't have link previews that could have caught that because it was some sort of "science project" that PG, who is also much older and yet less experienced than me, wrote to promote his use of his own Arc Lisp-DSL...sound familiar?]

Rust strikes again :)

"The project is fully developed in the Rust programming language, from the backend API server to the CLI tools to a completely new frontend. The frontend is built on the new widget toolkit that we developed over the last few years. This offers a more modern web user interface experience, not only in terms of appearance and functionality, but also in terms of accessibility, speed, and compatibility."

This link seems to work:

https://www.proxmox.com/en/about/press-releases/proxmox-data...

Have to login to see any of the screenshots

https://bugmenot.com/view/forum.proxmox.com to the rescue (the rh8dohgnoidr username worked for me)

https://imgur.com/a/8jmfHVB are the two screenshots from the first post

One will want to avoid using $(git clone --recursive) since they have a bogus url in their .gitmodules https://git.proxmox.com/?p=proxmox-datacenter-manager.git;a=...

> since they have a bogus url in their .gitmodules

Fixed just now.

Does that work for you in your CI or what?

  fatal: remote error: access denied or repository not exported: /rust/proxmox-api-types

and I tried the https flavor, just in case, with the same outcome

  fatal: repository 'https://git.proxmox.com/rust/proxmox-api-types/' not found

Argh, I had a borked test, sorry!

Now fixed the second module too and did a fresh clone in a fresh, isolated directory to confirm it really works now.

Looks like it's getting hugged to death.

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