[Feedhenry-raincatcher] Raincatcher feedback from a newbie

Thu Jan 26 14:30:26 UTC 2017

On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 9:26 AM, Austin Cunningham <aucunnin at redhat.com>
wrote:

> Hi All,
> Being a noob tutorials on Raincatcher are definitely needed. The one
> tutorial I found on adding a gps module to the demo app became difficult to
> follow after a few steps. There are learning curves with all front ends so
> weather it is Angular 1.0 or  another doesn't make much of a difference. I
> agree that the strongly decoupled nature of Raincatcher can make it hard to
> see how the modules interact
>
>
Well it isn't the learning curve for the Angular vs something else I am
worried about.  It is the fact that we are pushing something which is
already based on a legacy technology that Google is already moving away
from.

I'm fine with an up front "If you don't know Angular (or React or
whatever), go do this tutorial and come back here".

> Regards
> Austin
>
> On 25 January 2017 at 14:49, Summers Pittman <supittma at redhat.com> wrote:
>
>> 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/fee
>> dhenry-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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>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Austin Cunningham
> Rapid Mobile Application Development Team
> <https://docs.jboss.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=9470209> (RMAD)
> <https://docs.jboss.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=9470209>
> Email:aucunnin at redhat.com
>
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