[Feedhenry-raincatcher] Raincatcher feedback from a newbie

Thu Jan 26 15:01:24 UTC 2017

On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 3:58 PM, Summers Pittman <supittma at redhat.com>
wrote:

> Reattaching the list because I think something got lost.
>
> On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 9:41 AM, Damien Murphy <damurphy at redhat.com>
> wrote:
>
>> I think this is a really valuable discussion, and think as a
>> community-focussed project, Raincatcher is a great opportunity to give
>> thought and consideration to things we might otherwise not prioritise so
>> much.
>>
>> As a community project as such, and one in which we want to gain as much
>> buy-in as possible & build a thriving community of contributors, I agree
>> with much of what has been spoken about so far.
>>
>> I think the project needs to be as friendly as possible to get involved
>> in, which goes across a number of fronts, from documentation to codebase to
>> technologies used.
>>
>> I think while we're stuck with angular 1 for the moment, it would be good
>> to change that when the opportunity presents itself, with the use of
>> interesting and more current technologies in Raincatcher helping draw
>> people in & want to contribute/ be a part of things.
>>
>
> Right.  I'm a developer so burn it all to the ground and start over is in
> my DNA :).
>
> What we should be mindful of is taking some time at some point this year
> is to make some blog posts or demo applications which show how to use
> Raincatcher with other technologies.  Right now it is VERY angular, but I
> am aware that Nial is working on some refactorings which may make this
> easier in the future.  However, these blog posts don't have to be
> "supported" outside of "yeah we did an experiment once, it is possible,
> tell us what you think and file some JIRAs"
>
Also keep in mind that "only" 50% is Angular, the other 50% are the NodeJS
backend bits, the mediator itself is also framework "agnostic".

>
>
>
>
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 2:30 PM, Summers Pittman <supittma at redhat.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> 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
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> Feedhenry-raincatcher mailing list
>>>>> Feedhenry-raincatcher at redhat.com
>>>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/feedhenry-raincatcher
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> 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
>>>>
>>>> Red Hat Mobile,
>>>> Communications House
>>>> Cork Road
>>>> Waterford
>>>> X91NY33
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>
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>>
>
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