Hello,
As part of working on OFBIZ-12789 to see if we could further utilise
NPM as
a repository of various javascript modules rather than keep those
modules'
sources in the OFBiz source repository, I went down a bit of a
rabbit hole
changing the OFBiz build to allow node/npm use in multiple OFBiz
components
(gradle sub-projects).
My aim was to allow a plugin to be able to use npm modules without
having
to modify the ofbiz-framework parent build.gradle file. The current
use of
npm for common-theme involves configuration applied in the root
build.gradle file.
The result was a 'convention' plugin, created in
ofbiz-framework/buildSrc
which describes how the Gradle Node Plugin should be applied to a
gradle
project. OFBiz components wishing to use node when building can
'apply' the
ofbiz-node-conventions plugin to their gradle sub-project which will:
- apply and configure the com.github.node-gradle plugin
- configure the plugin to use 'npm install' or 'npm ci' depending on
if the
CI environment variable is defined.
- run 'npm install/ci' as part of the 'classes' parent gradle task,
ensuring npm modules have been retrieved regardless of whether
gradle is
being used to build, run or create a distribution of OFBiz.
- clean up retrieved node_modules as part of the parent project's
'cleanAll' task.
These changes can be viewed in PR (
https://github.com/apache/ofbiz-framework/pull/621).
[
Note: Gradle documents relating to 'convention' plugins: -
https://docs.gradle.org/current/samples/sample_convention_plugins.html
-
https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/organizing_gradle_projects.html#sec:build_sources
]
A corresponding PR has been created for ofbiz-plugins (
https://github.com/apache/ofbiz-plugins/pull/77). This PR introduces a
change to the example plugin to demonstrate use of the Gradle Node
Plugin
in an OFBiz plugin component.
In the case of the example plugin, a small Typescript React web
application, created using Vite, has been integrated to show an OFBiz
screen can be rendered to include CSS and javascript created by an npm
build step. If there is an appetite to keep this functionality in the
example plugin, perhaps we can extend the react app to call the REST
api to
retrieve and display live OFBiz data.
I think these changes will be very useful for plugins which need to
incorporate a web front-end, such as eCommerce, rest-api (swagger),
solr
and webpos. These plugins all use some externally sourced javascript
modules which should hopefully be available from NPM. In my opinion it
would be great to get these modules out of the OFBiz sources and
retrieve
them at build time.
QUESTIONS
Any concerns about this approach to retrieving javascript code at build
time? We already decided to take this approach with common-theme, but
applying the pattern more widely will increase the time it takes to
perform
an initial build. Subsequent builds should be faster since node_modules
would have already been downloaded by all components using the build
pattern.
Should we apply these changes to Release 22.01?
I would like to do so as I think it will make it easier for system
integrators to deploy more feature rich plugins with OFBiz. However
I do
appreciate that we need to stop making changes to 22.01 at some point
otherwise we'll keep delaying its eventual release. However again,
if these
changes are useful for system integrators, then it could be years
before
they can use them in a future 23.xx/24.xx release.
Please give the PRs a try and let me know what you think.
Thanks,
Dan.
