[Building Sakai] Using WebJars to maintain core JS dependencies

[Sam Ottenhoff]

Matthew B pointed me to the WebJars project that maintains JS dependencies
in JARs. This means that instead of downloading the full JS code from
upstream projects, we could maintain and upgrade the dependencies in our
Maven pom.xml files. More info about WebJars:

  http://www.webjars.org/

We are tracking in a JIRA:

  https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-29063

The pros are clear: easy maintenance of JS dependencies the same way we
maintain our Java lib dependencies.

The cons as I see them:

a) The conf/catalina.properties
property org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.jarsToSkip can't be set
to *.jar as these WebJars need to be scanned by Tomcat.  This will mean
slower startups (~2x unless we can come up with a comprehensive list of
JARs to exclude).

b) Some institutions probably host /library/ on their front-end load
balancer instead of in Tomcat. Using WebJars will require slightly more
work to unroll the dependencies for the front-end load balancer to serve.

Thoughts on WebJars?

--Sam
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