The future of Lychee: what is coming next. 🚀

cross posted here on GitHub Discussion

Hi everyone,

The problem. 💢

After having worked on Lychee and the Livewire migration for the past 3 years, and having it battle tested over the last 6 months (version 5 till version 5.5). It is obvious that this was not a good decision. While Livewire is a nice concept by Caleb, it is not applicable in our case. The rendering times are just too long. Loading an album with 700+ pictures is just too heavy computationally wise.

What does this means for now? 🤔

I am starting to work on Lychee v6. Yes already… I made the decision to rewrite the front-end once again. This time I will be working with Vue3. It is one of the industry standard and should make the interaction with the server faster.

Have all those years spent on doing this “vanilla-JS-to-Livewire” conversion gone to waste? No.
While I did this conversion I also migrated the front-end to tailwind css, all this will be reused in with Vue. I am also planning to make use of PrimeVue to simplify some of the logic (e.g. modals, menus). Part of the current front-end are also making use of AlpineJS, so more code that can be reused there.

The compilation step will stay the same: composer & npm with vite. Just the front-end will change.

About backward compatibility. 🚫

When I did the migration v4-v5, I made the Livewire front-end optional, giving the ability to users to disable this behavior. With v6, I do not plan to do the same, this involves too much complexity to keep v4 front-end (vanila), v5 front-end (livewire) and v6 (vue). As a consequence on v6, there will be only one front-end: Vue (and possibly legacy legacy vanilla, but unlikely).

As this is a major version bump, do not expect the API to stay the same. I will try to preserve some backward compatibility in most of the calls, but some other may change (e.g. uploading to support chunks).

That being said, the migration from v5 to v6 should be as easy if not simpler than the one from v4 to v5. Expect your familiar lychee look and feel, just a different javascript front-end.

When will the v6 be available ? ⏩

It is very difficult to say, as I am not really able to estimate the amount of work to be done. My free time is quite limited between work, all the sport practice, the lady and doing photography (the main reason why I maintain this project). So please be patient (sorry).

Support and the team. 🦸

At the moment, only @d7415 and I (@ildyria) are maintaining Lychee, @d7415 doing most of the review work while I am working on fixing the bugs & trying to provide improvements. We aim to maintain this free open-source photography library with high quality of code.

If you feel like helping us, don’t hesitate to join us on discord or gitter.

If you are using Lychee, a small token of gratitude will go a long way. You can support further development (and bug fixes!) of Lychee on opencollective or on GitHub.