[Building Sakai] Using WebJars to maintain core JS dependencies

[Matthew Buckett]

Sam's got a blacklist of JARs to exclude to speed up startup again:
https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-29063?focusedCommentId=199090&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel#comment-199090

We're going to have to deal with the JAR scanning at some point, as
people pull in other more modern frameworks/libraries.

Whatever we do we shouldn't preclude using JAR scanning in the future.


On 16 February 2015 at 15:25, Sam Ottenhoff <ottenhoff at longsight.com> wrote:
> 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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-- 
  Matthew Buckett, VLE Developer, IT Services, University of Oxford