[Koha-devel] Proposal for ES6 development on the staff client

[Jesse]

2017-08-29 17:33 GMT-06:00 David Cook <dcook at prosentient.com.au>:

> Thanks for the info, Jesse. I haven’t reviewed Bugzilla or Github, but I
> just have a couple of questions.
>
>
>
> If I understand correctly, we’ll be bundling the Javascript packages in
> with Koha for deployment, is that right?
>

Correct. After being built, all of the necessary JS (our own transpiled
code and its dependencies) will be bundled together.


>
>
> If that’s the case, will only the build machine will need Nodejs, npm,
> yarn, Gulp, Browserify, Babel, etc? If so, then the onus of these
> additional dependencies is really just for developers or people installing
> from source? The Debian packages would just the transpiled versions of the
> Javascript? I imagine that would satisfy the community’s desire to just use
> upstream packages from Debian?
>

Correct.


>
>
> For those of us who do install from source, would this transpiling process
> be automated via the Makefile?
>

It easily could be. In my original email, the global install (sudo npm
install -g) of yarn was purely for convenience. The entire process could
become:

$ sudo apt install nodejs npm # or koha-builddeps or koha-jsdeps (or
koha-perldeps if we feel like being lazy)
$ make build-js

Where the Makefile took care of downloading yarn, installing all the JS
dependencies, and building the files.


>
>
> David Cook
>
> Systems Librarian
>
> Prosentient Systems
>
> 72/330 Wattle St
>
> Ultimo, NSW 2007
>
> Australia
>
>
>
> Office: 02 9212 0899
>
> Direct: 02 8005 0595
>
>
>
> *From:* koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org [mailto:
> koha-devel-bounces at lists.koha-community.org] *On Behalf Of *Jesse
> *Sent:* Wednesday, 30 August 2017 7:27 AM
> *To:* koha-devel at lists.koha-community.org
> *Subject:* [Koha-devel] Proposal for ES6 development on the staff client
>
>
>
>
>
> As part of my work on bug 15522 <https://bugs.koha-community.
> org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=15522>, I've been working with Preact (a
> React clone with a friendlier license). We've established that this needs
> ES6[1] in previous discussions on the mailing list and in IRC. From there,
> we found IE's many limitations meant we needed a transpiler[2] to to make
> use of these features.
>
> Owen and I have been thinking about the easiest way to do this, and this
> is the lowest-friction process we've come up with to transpile ES6:
>
> $ sudo apt-get install nodejs npm
>
> $ sudo npm install -g yarn
>
> $ yarn install
>
> $ yarn build
>
> Yarn is a somewhat faster version of npm, the de-facto JavaScript package
> manager. Normally, this would be a pointless addition, but the npm in the
> Debian repositories is 3 major versions out of date, and therefore not a
> great option. Many npm packages simply fail to install.
>
> This is a constant problem with the JS packages in the Debian repos; most
> if not all of the tools that one might want either are completely
> unpackaged or woefully out of date. Packaging them ourselves means working
> our way through a number of dependencies (see [3] for an example). Any
> frontend build process worth our time cannot solely use packages from the
> upstream repos.
>
> That aside, this build process will use Gulp, Browserify and Babel to take
> any files in koha-tmpl/intranet-tmpl/prog/js/src, and compile them into a
> matching file in koha-tmpl/intranet-tmpl/prog/js/built . This means that
> any new files will not have to be manually whitelisted.
>
> You can see a working example at https://github.com/pianohacker/koha,
> branch bz15522. I'm currently committing the built versions of the files,
> but this is purely for convenience of prototyping. The page in question is
> admin/policy.pl, and the relevant code is at .../prog/js/src/admin/policy.js
> .
>
>
>
> [1] ECMAScript 6, a semi-recent version of JavaScript with a large number
> of new features, including a nice class syntax, arrow functions, and
> destructuring assignment.
>
> [2] A tool that transforms ES6 syntax (and the JSX syntax extension used
> by (P)react) into something that can be run by older browsers, including IE.
> [3] https://wiki.debian.org/Javascript/Nodejs/Tasks/gulp
>
>
>
> --
>
> Jesse Weaver
>



-- 
Jesse Weaver
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