Document Policy GUI and gui-server

[policy/parent.git] / docs / ui / ui.rst

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+.. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
+
+.. _ui-label:
+
+The Policy Framework User Interfaces
+####################################
+
+The Policy Framework has a demonstration user interface that supports design time and runtime activities for the Policy
+Framework.
+
+Design time activities are offline activities such as policy editing and ACM composition preparation. The design time UI
+works with offline files, producing artifacts that can be consumed by the runtime Policy Framework APIs.
+
+Runtime operations include creating and updating policy types and policies, deploying policies as well as working with
+Automation Compositions. The runtime UI works towards the REST APIs published by the Policy Framework.
+
+.. image:: images/UIArchitecture.png
+
+.. note::
+   The policy framework UI is developed for use in demonstrations. It is a work in progress. As such, it does not cover
+   all the features and functions that are avaiable on the Policy Framework REST APIs.
+
+A Policy Framework installation in Kubernetes is shown in the figure above. The **policy-api**, **policy-pap** and
+**acm-runtime** microservices publish REST interfaces. In a Service Mesh installation, these interfaces are exposed
+over HTTP and are available inside the Service Mesh. Alternatively, the interfaces may be exposed publicly over HTTPS.
+
+The **gui-server** microservice serves the GUI code to the browser for Policy Framework UI. In addition, it acts as
+a single point of reference for the REST interfaces provided by **policy-api**, **policy-pap**, and **acm-runtime**.
+It can also be used as a HTTPS gatewy for REST references into a Policy Framework deployment in a Kubernetes cluster.
+
+The Policy Framework UI runs in a browser as a Web application. It has a **designtime** and a **runtime** part.
+
+.. image:: images/MainUI.png
+
+The Policy Framework main UI is shown in the image above. It is, at present, a plain HTML page.
+
+The pages below describe the elements of the Policy Framework UI.
+
+.. toctree::
+   :maxdepth: 4
+
+   designtime-ui/designtime-ui
+   runtime-ui/runtime-ui