Proposal: better intermediary means of managing external front-end Javascript dependencies in Infusion-based projects using nom + grunt

Harnum, Alan aharnum at ocadu.ca
Tue Mar 1 19:10:59 UTC 2016


Antranig, I do like the idea of the basic use case being “use the front-end packages in the node structure as far as possible” - this would work just fine for the Chart Authoring case or other cases where the goal is basically the production of a classic “static” site. My sense is that the NPM folks are likely to produce some tooling in the short-medium around this, based on this post: http://blog.npmjs.org/post/101775448305/npm-and-front-end-packaging - hence my desire not to wed ourselves too closely to any particular tooling.

The other use case that comes to mind right now is the production of “widget” Javascript files (for lack of a better term) where the goal is to provide a single static Javascript file that can be used by a site to embed Infusion-based components (that might also include external dependencies like D3 or Flocking) without knowing anything about Infusion. This is the situation we’re in approaching the front-end components for the QI, which we want to be straightforwardly embeddable in the (currently Drupal-based, to my knowledge) Dev Space site or in other contexts. Issue at https://issues.gpii.net/browse/GPII-1583 has a bit more detail on this.

Per that use case, I actually wasn’t aware of the Infusion module registration scheme (my knowledge on Infusion is pretty much front-end only at this point) , but this may be relevant to the work that Avtar and I are doing for the QI. Under that approach (if I’m understanding correctly), the QI service could handle the inclusion of any necessary external libraries into an overall JSONP-based payload for the client site after the initial dependency pull via npm. Make sense?

ALAN HARNUM
SENIOR INCLUSIVE DEVELOPER
INCLUSIVE DESIGN RESEARCH CENTRE, OCAD UNIVERSITY

E aharnum at ocadu.ca<mailto://aharnum@ocadu.ca>

On Mar 1, 2016, at 1:49 PM, Antranig Basman <antranig.basman at colorado.edu<mailto:antranig.basman at colorado.edu>> wrote:

Cheers, Alan - this is a really important and strategic issue and I wanted to thank you for organising the discussion in such a clear way.

I think the basic plan here is highly desirable - to move towards npm infrastructure and package.json as our central solution for managing JS dependencies, and to use browserify when we need to build single-file distribution bundles.

I am wondering whether we can simplify the steps in the proposal yet further - that is, whether we can cut out the grunt tasks and ignore structure, and as far as possibly simply use the node modules in place where they are fetched using npm.

You may be aware that every Infusion-aware npm module now participates in its "module registration scheme" kicked off from fluid.module.register - http://docs.fluidproject.org/infusion/development/NodeAPI.html#fluid-module-register-name-basedir-modulerequire- - this makes it easy to resolve paths into foreign modules by simple expressions like "%flocking/src/stuff" etc.

Kettle's "static middleware" could host these directories using these symbolic references directly - or even automatically, if we add extra directives to package.json or elsewhere -
https://github.com/amb26/kettle/tree/KETTLE-32#built-in-standard-middleware-bundled-with-kettle

Other points in our future roadmap might include BRFS or something like it to bridge the gap between the view of static assets from the point of view of node and the browser - https://github.com/substack/brfs - or little things like "staticify" https://github.com/petehunt/staticify - of which there seem to be a dozen.

Does this make sense/fit in with the use cases and road map you imagine? I'm keen to have something that involves us in as little build faff and boilerplate as possible, based on the npm infrastructure but with as many of the affordances of bower as possible - what do you think? Are there some "hard core use cases" that we can't easily meet with the files in their "native position" inside node_modules directories?

Cheers,

Antranig

On 01/03/2016 18:33, Harnum, Alan wrote:
*Background*
*
*
The Chart Authoring Tool (https://github.com/fluid-project/chartAuthoring) is built with Infusion, the D3
data visualization library, and the Flocking audio synthesis framework (created by the Fluid community's own
Colin Clark).

At the moment the non-Infusion dependencies are directly included as files in the project repository. This
is simple, but bad in various other ways in terms of keeping things up to date, keeping the repo clean, etc.

There has been an outstanding issue since last August to improve this situation
(https://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLOE-405?jql=text%20~%20%22bower%22
<https://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLOE-405?jql=text ~ "bower">).

Originally the thought was to use Bower, but Bower seems to be facing some challenges as a project
(https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/3th4v6/bower_vs_npm_3_frontend_package_management/) and the
general direction of many other projects seems to be towards using straight npm (sometimes with a tool like
browserify) to manage front-end dependencies.

Infusion itself is moving in this direction as NPM becomes a more viable for front-end management, as
evidenced by this issue: https://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-5745?jql=text%20~%20%22bower%22
<https://issues.fluidproject.org/browse/FLUID-5745?jql=text ~ "bower">

*My Immediate Goal / Challenge*

I'm starting work on front-end Infusion-based components for the GPII Quality Infrastructure where I would
like to be able to reuse some code from the Chart Authoring repo itself, so rather than replicate the
problem again I’d like to have an approach that does the following:

- works with the existing toolstack for builds (npm + grunt) without other tool dependencies such as
browserify, webpack, etc
- produces a suitable static “package" for serving publicly, as is used currently by
http://build.fluidproject.org/
- has minimal development overhead but improves the current situation
- can be replaced easily enough in the future when we align on a better means of managing front-end dependencies

*What I Propose*
*
*
Examples here are in the context of the Chart Authoring Tool project in my fork at
https://github.com/waharnum/chartAuthoring/blob/FLOE-405/ but I’d like the general shape of this to be
applicable to other cases:

- front-end dependencies should be managed using NPM’s /package.json/ format and installed via a standard
‘npm install’ (https://github.com/waharnum/chartAuthoring/blob/FLOE-405/package.json)
- one or more grunt tasks should then be used to copy these dependencies into an appropriate structure for
use by the front end project (https://github.com/waharnum/chartAuthoring/blob/FLOE-405/Gruntfile.js)
- a .gitignore definition should be used to make sure this external dependency directory is not versioned
(https://github.com/waharnum/chartAuthoring/blob/FLOE-405/.gitignore)

Basically, a front-end project will pull in its dependencies via NPM and then distribute them as needed via
grunt to create the necessary “product"; the specifics of this will depend on the particular project. We
already use both npm and grunt in other contexts, they’re familiar to us, and they avoid the need (which we
have, but longer term) to adopt a specific additional piece of tooling for front-end dependency management,
which is a space that seems in heavy churn right now in the Javascript community.

We talked about this approach briefly at the Floe planning meeting yesterday and people seemed receptive,
but the broader community should weigh in and give their opinion.

*Questions*
*
*
1) Do we feel OK with this approach to front-end dependency management in the short term?
2) If we don’t feel OK about it, what should we do instead?

*ALAN HARNUM*
SENIOR INCLUSIVE DEVELOPER
INCLUSIVE DESIGN RESEARCH CENTRE, OCAD UNIVERSITY

*E *aharnum at ocadu.ca <mailto://aharnum@ocadu.ca>



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