Components view not visible enough

[feloy]

When I open the plugin view, the views on left bar are, in this order:

• Application Explorer
• Components
• Devfile Registries
• Debug Sessions

As a developer, I would expect that the Components view is the first one in the list, as this is the first one I want to focus on: I first need to "Start Dev" from the Components view before there are any information available in the "Application Explorer".

This is especially true when running on podman, where the Application Explorer is not necessary.

I understand that the dev needs to connect to a cluster before to be able to work, but this should, IMHO, be triggered by an alert (pop-pu, etc) and not by the fact that the Application Explorer is first in the list.

[mohitsuman]

@feloy The views can be dragged and dropped as per user preference. Now coming to the Default view when the extension loads up, the Application Explorer view lists down the cluster information and the deployments already present in it.

So let's say I am connected to my OpenShift cluster and already have 3 application deployments, it will reflect in the tree view. And then the user can go to the component view and execute the actions.

Now for the first time (without logged in to the cluster), the Application Explorer has all the buttons to get started with the extension such as Login, Add OpenShift, Import and create component. It makes sense to have these buttons in the first view rather than the second view.

Example below:

[dgolovin]

@mohitsuman @feloy I am fine ether way. Leaning more to @feloy side because there are not so many features left in Explorer after migration to odo 3. @mohitsuman it is your call to merge or not to merge a PR to move Components view at top position.

[kadel]

I always found those two views confusing.

I'm a new user coming into the Extension and looking at it with fresh eyes:

My application is not running (no odo dev session), I can see it only in the Components section but not in Appliaciton explorer. Why? It is application explorer, so why I don't see my application there?

When I start dev session than I suddenly can see it in the Application explorer, but now for some reason, it has a different name than in the component's view (-app is appended).

When I have something else running on the cluster (deployed via ODC for example), I can see it in Application explorer but not in components. This is also weird.

The application explorer looks more like a cluster explorer.

It might be also interesting to play with the idea of consolidating both views into one, it could actually make things easier to understand.

[dgolovin]

It makes sense to rename Application Explorer to Cluster Explorer.

Consolidating the two views is problematic, because it is now possible to run components without cluster. that was the purpose of having components view, that always shows the components from workspace no matter what kind dev env one has.

[kadel]

It makes sense to rename Application Explorer to Cluster Explorer.

+1
This would make things much clearer