Adding features to Widgets in Wookie: improving feature management with
versioning and dependencies
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Key: WOOKIE-329
URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WOOKIE-329
Project: Wookie
Issue Type: New Feature
Components: Feature Management
Reporter: Scott Wilson
Wookie allows the dynamic injection of feature implementations into Widgets;
what this means is that when an author creates a Widget, and declares that it
wants to use "feature xxx", then when the Widget is installed Wookie will look
for a "feature xxx" and inject any JavaScript and CSS into the Widget specified
in the Feature definition. This definition is an XML file that Wookie reads in
on launch. For more information see
http://incubator.apache.org/wookie/docs/developer/features.html
However, there are some issues with this mechanism that could be improved. One
is that sometimes one feature may depend on another - for example, if the
feature required is JQuery Mobile, this also depends on JQuery; however as
there is no way to handle this dynamically, the usual solution is to include
all dependencies in the feature. However, if the same widget requires multiple
features, each of which require the same set of dependencies, then it is very
easy for a widget to end up with multiple versions of common includes such as
JQuery.
A related issue is versioning - if a widget author has tested their widget
using a particular version of a feature, they don't want their widget to fail
in deployment if there has been a breaking change in the latest version of the
feature dynamically injected by Wookie.
So overall there is a need to make features more robust and predictable for
authors and with less duplication of common includes by adding dependencies and
versioning to the feature management aspect of Wookie.
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