[Feedhenry-raincatcher] Raincatcher feedback from a newbie

[Summers Pittman]

Because I didn't want to influence people's responses, I've included my
thoughts inline.

On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 9:29 AM, Summers Pittman <supittma at redhat.com>
wrote:

> We were chatting on the devXP slack today and had an interesting take on
> Raincatcher's shortcomings from a newbie's perspective.
>
> TL;DR; Raincatcher is HARD
>
> Here is a list of some of the issues we've run across.
>
> 0.  I've had Raincatcher described to me as a architecture for writing
> Raincatcher applications using Raincatcher modules.  For workforce
> management.
>

I think we can learn some things from jBPM (a similar project to
Raincatcher, just it is larger in scope [I think, RC isn't well defined]).

For instance let's compare
https://github.com/feedhenry-raincatcher/raincatcher-documentation to
https://docs.jboss.org/jbpm/release/6.5.0.Final/jbpm-docs/html/

the jBPM has "What is jBPM" as its very first entry in docs.  The
Raincatcher documentation never makes this case.


>
> 1.  The highly decoupled nature of the codebase hides how the modules
> should interact with each other. By should I mean you can't look at the
> demo project and quickly get an idea of how one should architect a
> greenfield RC application.
>
>
Let's take workorders and workflows as examples here.  The first thing that
I was told was that Raicatcher uses workflows to move workorders through
their lifecycle.  However, the documentaiton for these modules doesn't try
to explain this relationship and the code is intentionally decoupled
despite the fact that the examples have workflowIds on the workorder with
no real explanation.

More tutorials, whitepapers, and documentation will help this.  Also I
think we can gain a lot from taking the time to write our own, personal,
Raincatcher applications to get a "feel" for how the framework works.


> 2.  Angular is a huge, opinionated framework with lots of gotchas, and
> Angular went the route of "Let's add a bunch of custom tags and attributes
> to html elements".  This has the effect of breaking lots of tools and
> making learning Raincatcher even harder.
>
>
The only way to solve this problem is to be upfront : If you don't know
Angular don't come near Raincatcher.  I don't think it makes sense to
"abstract" angular away.

Also we are launching a Angular 1.x project when Angular 2.x is where
Google is pointing people.  This will be a hard sell as it is already
"legacy"/


> 3.  Feedhenry makes it very difficult to deploy applications which have
> dependencies on auth services.
>

This is a problem for all Feedhenry applications which we should probably
take up on feedhenry-dev.  However, until we can get a community cluster
this really isn't a barrier to adoption.


>
> 4.  Raincatcher uses message passing, but the APIs themselves don't make
> discovering available namespaces easy or automatic.  Developers have to be
> highly aware of the name spacing, what modules are available, and the RC
> conventions.
>

This is hard to solve because JavaScript really sucks for this type of
discovery.  We could probably write plugins for a few IDEs that will
examine the package.json file of a project and make suggestions based on
that.

There is actually a lot we can do with tooling and IDE integration which
will be very helpful.  Just having a way to quickly navigate between a
event handler and an event emitter inside of a project would be a huge win.


>
> 5. Raincatcher lacks tutorials and simple sample applications. We have the
> portal which is a kitchen sink project (great for excitement and
> presentations, not for learning), and the demo application (an example of
> how to add a custom module).
>
>
This is probably the easiest to solve.  We write apps using Raincatcher and
publish why we made the decisions we made and how someone else can do the
same thing.

I'm working on a tutorial that is inspired by the Android Notepad
tutorial.  Hopefully I will have something this week for people to chew on
and give feedback on.


> So what do you guys think?
>
> Summers
>
>
>
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