Mike does a great job of summing up the main issue here. As to Roger’s suggestion about creating a utilities jar, this is a potential solution—and using maven (and having our own repo) does make it easier to share jars this way. Will we have issues if two running modules include the same jar (of course, this already happens with external jars—have we run into any problems with this)? One of the advantages of having the utilities as a separate module is that we won’t run into this case—the jar would be marked as “provided” in the pom and the utilities module would be marked as required in the module config.
Mark From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Seaton Sent: Wednesday, January 18, 2012 9:14 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [OPENMRS-IMPLEMENTERS] 1.10 MUST have Hi Roger, It is true that I am a developer, but the issues I raise are one of maintenance and support of our large implementations that contain many modules with lots of complex dependencies. To the contrary of your point, as the developer of many of these modules, I am comfortable knowing what I need to install and maintain and why. My concern is that the module framework does not give developers an easy way to hide these complexities from the end user or implementer. This is my motivation here. Mike On 01/18/2012 08:24 AM, Friedman, Roger (CDC/CGH/DGHA) (CTR) wrote: I find this entire thread a little disconcerting because it's all developers raising problems that developers have because they're constantly changing their configuration and bringing modules up and down. Except for automatic download of dependencies, there seems to be little in this thread useful to sysadmins, let alone users. As for this particular suggestion, what's wrong with having my cool utililties as a jar that's referenced in one or more modules? We could keep them in contributions and the maven repo. Are your cool utilities going to be designed generally enough and documented well enough for others to use them? Are we dedicated enough to reuse that we would bother to find the documentation and figure them out rather than write our own? From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Seaton Sent: Friday, January 13, 2012 10:14 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: [OPENMRS-IMPLEMENTERS] 1.10 MUST have I'm really happy that Rafal has raised this and would love to see many of the improvements raised here. To Mark's point, let's say I have a few useful utility classes methods that I have written in a module and I find myself copying / re-writing these in many of my other modules. Obviously it would be better to be able to maintain this code in one place and use it within my modules, rather than try to maintain it in multiple places. Right now, the only real way to do that would be to create a new OpenMRS module with these utility classes, and to make all of my other modules require it as a dependency. The problem with this is that an implementer has to actually do find the "MyCoolUtilities" module and install it in order to install the module that has the actual feature that they care about. This utility module really has no meaning to them and is really an implementation detail. The reporting module is sort of like this - you have to install the "serialization.xstream" module and the "htmlwidgets" module before you can install the reporting module. Neither of these modules provide any UI components or features to an end-user, and are basically meaningless to an implementer. But the implementer needs to find them, install them, and maintain them nonetheless. I think this is an area we could improve with some thought. I also want to strongly second the notion of trying to think through ways where we can make it easy for modules to bundle support for multiple (incompatible) OpenMRS versions, and to provide integration features between itself and one or more other modules that are optional. Rafal's examples are all on point. I would love to see this topic continue to be discussed, perhaps on an upcoming design or developers call... Thanks, Mike On 01/13/2012 03:15 PM, Burke Mamlin wrote: Mark, can you think about how/why module management in OpenMRS feels "thick" to you? Both Eclipse & OpenMRS list their plugins/modules and let you manage them. Why in particular does Eclipse – with many more plugins – feel lighter to you? +1 for improving module management (in fact, Shazin did this for GSoC a couple years ago and it never got committed) +1 for ways to make it easier to handle dependencies (like including them with an omod or making the module manager capable of grabbing them for you if you have internet connectivity) I'm not excited (at least at first blush) about trying to make multiple modules (a module & its dependencies) look like a single module in the module manager, since dependencies are not 1-to-many (they're many-to-many). -Burke On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 1:46 PM, Mark Goodrich <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Definitely a +1 here. I think that modules should be lighter, or at least there should be a lighter alternative. In Rwanda we are running 20+ modules, and we are going to be approaching that number in Haiti. That seems like "too much", but mainly because of the heaviness of module management. For instance, if I check my installed Eclipse plug-ins I see that I have a zillion installed--it is just much more transparent to me, and not something I have to worry about on a day-to-day basis. I envision some sort of dependency system, where if you download a module that requires other modules, it can automatically download the other dependencies for you. Another idea I had was to build a module that simply contains a set of related utility methods and/or services that I want to be able to use in many different modules... but I'd like to be able to do this without having to build a full OpenMRS module that implementers have to install independently. Mark -----Original Message----- From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] On Behalf Of Rafal Korytkowski Sent: Friday, January 13, 2012 12:01 PM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [OPENMRS-IMPLEMENTERS] 1.10 MUST have Hey, 1.9 is almost out. I'd like to start a discussion on what to include in 1.10. Let's have a better module support! Module management needs to be improved. We're saying OpenMRS is a modular architecture, but it's hard to acknowledge working with the Manage Modules page. I'm asking for a feature that allows to pack a few modules together in a single omod which can be installed and managed as one. Let's say we have HTML Form Entry and HTML Form Entry Designer. There's no point in distributing HTML Form Entry Designer alone since it requires HTML Form Entry to run. The other example is still hypothetical. Let's say you want to share reports from the Reporting module using the Metadata Sharing module. For that to work you would need the ReportingMDSSupport module. Why you need to know that? It should be packaged and managed by the Reporting module. It's the Reporting module that should know that if the Metadata Sharing module is started, it should start the RerportingMDSSupport. Going further, there's a great new feature in 1.9: visists. In order for the HTML Form Entry module to make use of that you would need HTML Form Entry 1.9 Compatibility module. And then comes 1.10 with even better visits and you need yet another HTML Form Entry 1.10 Compatibility module. It's a management nightmare to install all those modules and keep them running, but should be easily managed by the HTML Form Entry itself which when installed on 1.9 should simply start the 1.9 Compatibility feature. Hope I explained the idea good enough! I'm waiting for thumbs up or down for this idea! -Rafal _________________________________________ To unsubscribe from OpenMRS Implementers' mailing list, send an e-mail to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> with "SIGNOFF openmrs-implement-l" in the body (not the subject) of your e-mail. [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>?body=SIGNOFF%20openmrs-implement-l] ________________________________ Click here to unsubscribe<mailto:[email protected]?body=SIGNOFF%20openmrs-implement-l> from OpenMRS Implementers' mailing list ________________________________ Click here to unsubscribe<mailto:[email protected]?body=SIGNOFF%20openmrs-implement-l> from OpenMRS Implementers' mailing list ________________________________ Click here to unsubscribe<mailto:[email protected]?body=SIGNOFF%20openmrs-implement-l> from OpenMRS Implementers' mailing list
