Today marks the release of a new major version of the Korp frontend 🎉 The user interface code has been rewritten from the ground up, using a modern web framework and boasting a fresh and improved look and feel.
(The frontend part of the application is the graphical user interface that you interact with as a user. The backend, on the other hand, operates the corpus database and executes your search queries.)
A brief technical history
Korp's history is described in Korp: Språkbanken’s word research platform. The platform was created in 2010, and the frontend was originally powered by JQuery, with AngularJS added two years later.
In 2016, Angular 2 was released, but migration was non-trivial and we kept putting it off. The 1.x branch lived on for many years, but was eventually declared EOL (end of life) in 2021.
It was time for us to roll up our sleeves and migrate to a framework under active maintenance. Meanwhile, in other projects, we had adopted Vue.js as our new frontend framework of choice.
The work of adapting the Korp frontend to Vue.js 3 started in late 2024. Now, two years later, we can finally release the result!
Design and improvements
Most notable to you, as a user, is the revamped look and feel. The design arises from these three factors:
- Språkbanken's theme colors: A vivid orange and a comfortable teal
- Bootstrap 5 as a design toolkit: A sort of pattern language to coherent interactive components like dropdowns and checkboxes
- A conservative layout strategy: Whether you have used Korp previously or not, you should find things where you expect them
While rewriting code components to work with the new framework, we have also been making some improvements related to the user experience (UX). These are some examples:
- Dark color scheme support
- More labels and short help texts to guide your usage of non-trivial features
- While loading, the result panel shows a progress bar
- and, if it takes more than a few seconds, a button to abort the search
If you are a seasoned Korp user, we hope you will enjoy these changes.
Configurable instances
Korp is released as free and open-source software (FOSS). If you host corpora at your own institution, you can simply (ask your developers to) set up your own Korp instance.
To fully support this use-case, developers need to be able to configure and customize the application without modifying original code. In the rewrite, configurability has been a primary requirement. You can adjust logos, colors, result tabs, search inputs, attribute formatting and more.
We'd like to thank the Language Bank of Finland, who has been a supportive partner in identifying the circumstances and needs that external institutional users may have.