On 11/05/2011 16:02, Scott Wilson wrote:
On 11 May 2011, at 15:37, Scott Wilson wrote:
On 11 May 2011, at 12:29, Scott Wilson wrote:
On 11 May 2011, at 12:08, Ross Gardler wrote:
On 11/05/2011 10:21, Scott Wilson wrote:
Just kicking off a new thread here, as its something we need to think
about for future direction.
The core purpose of Wookie is to be a W3C Widget server, however it
also does some "other stuff". At the moment, we build the whole
project in one go. However, it may be useful to have non-core modules
as optional builds rather than core functionality.
Steve mentions Wave as one example. The Wave feature is a very nice
one, but isn't a core W3C Widget feature. So this might be factored
out into an optional module (you could use either the Java/DWR or
NodeJS implementations)
Another one is JCR support. Currently Wookie is built with both JPA
and JCR persistence - should JCR be an optional, pluggable module
rather than built-in?
How do you imagine these optional components being managed? At build time? At
runtime?
The holy grail would be auto-configuration at runtime. That is, if a widget
indicates it requires a non-core feature Wookie tries to find an
implementation, downloads it and installs it (obviously with tight admin
controls).
Currently we require features to be added at compile time. This is not very
satisfactory. Whilst considering what is/is not core we perhaps ought to think
about an extension mechanism too. I'm not suggesting holding up progress on
this proposal until we have an extension mechanism ready. Buildtime
configuration is fine as a starting point, but having a vision of where we
think we are going would be a good idea.
Yes, for feature installs I'd really like to do something better than what we
have now. There really is no reason these have to be Java classes, they could
just as easily be XML config files loaded at runtime; they were patterned after
the Wave feature extension which had a lot more server-side custom code, but
that may be better treated as the exception rather than the template.
So a future model could be feature packages with:
/myfeature
feature.xml
(various js and css files)
... where "feature.xml" is something like:
<feature>
<name>http://jquerymobile.com</name>
<script src="jquery-1.5.min.js"/>
<script src="jquery.mobile-1.0a4-patched.min.js"/>
<stylesheet src="jquery.mobile-1.0a4.min.css"/>
</feature>
(which is quite similar to how Shindig manages features)
As this is something I've been meaning to do for ages, I added a ticket for it
and went ahead and implemented this. Its quite a bit of refactoring (mostly
deletions) but it doesn't look like it breaks any tests.
The new approach loads Features on start by inspecting the /features folder of
the local installation and then creating Feature objects for each valid
feature.xml file. It holds these in a static List rather than saving them in
the database (its only ever going to be a few small objects and doesn't need
any query support).
This could be extended relatively easily to include a folder watcher to
dynamically install features (similar to widgets) or to dynamically discover
and install features if they're needed for a widget (the UC Ross mentioned
above) as Feature no longer require any compilation steps.
I'm ready to commit this - I just wanted to give everyone a chance to
comment/object before I went ahead.
+ 1
Paul
Here's my strawman:
JQuery Mobile is one of many possible frameworks so I'd make this non-core.
As a general guide I would say anything added as a<feature...> in config.xml
should be non-core.
I'd also make the widget examples non-core as they will clutter up a live
install. It's easy enough to add something to the CLI along the lines of:
wookie installPack widgetSamples
This would get a list of widgets in the "widgetSamples" pack and deploy them to
a running instance.
I have an idea for how this "pack" thing could work. It's just a convenience
for managing groups of widgets from the command line. If we manage to get runtime
deployment of features then these packs could include appropriate features. I'll
implement this in the CLI if we head in this direction.
+1 sounds good, I like the idea of "packs".
(NB this is just the server, not the connectors sub-project)
+1 I don't think any of the connectors should be part of core. They are for
deployment on other platforms.
I'm not sure about "services" (effectively, tags) as to whether this
really is Wookie core functionality or something a "widget store"
like Rave's would add on top, e.g. user-generated tagging.
I have no idea what they are for, so I guess they are not core for me ;-)
Ross
