These were originally copied from node_modules via an "npm run thirdparty" task,
in order to have them loadable with oldschool <script> tags.
Since webpack supports CommonJS-style loading, that's no longer required,
we can simply inline those scripts into the bundle.
We need to use imports-loader though, in order to ensure
that "define" is not available in some module scopes,
which triggers AMD behavior that's not compatible with Webpack's loaders.
See http://webpack.github.io/docs/shimming-modules.html
I've had to pin to the exact versions used in the 3.x CMS,
since jquery-upload has introduced an AMD wrapper sometime
between 6.0 and 6.9 (the latest version NPM automatically pulls in).
This AMD wrapper confuses Webpack, since it's trying to resolve the
dependencies contained in it. We could create shims for those instead,
but the easiest way was to simply revert to the versions already used
before the Webpack migration (since the newer versions in node_modules
were never actually copied into thirdparty, they weren't used before).
The bundle is generated by running “webpack” directly - gulp is no
longer needed as an intermediary. The resulting config is a lot shorter,
although more configuration is pushed into lib.js.
Modules are shared between javascript files as global variables.
Although this global state pollution is a bit messy, I don’t think it’s
practically any worse than the previous state, and it highlights the
heavy coupling between the different packages we have in place.
Reducing the width of the coupling between the core javascript and
add-on modules would probably be a better way of dealing with this than
replacing global variables with some other kind of global state.
The web pack execution seems roughly twice as fast - if I clear out my
framework/client/dist/js folder, it takes 13.3s to rebuild. However,
it’s not rebuilding other files inside dist, only the bundle files.
CSS files are now included from javascript and incorporated into
bundle.css by the webpack. Although the style-loader is helpful in some
dev workflows (it allows live reload), it introduces a flash of
unstyled content which makes it inappropriate for production.
Instead ExtractTextPlugin is used to write all the aggregated CSS
into a single bundle.css file. A style-loader-based configuration could
be introduced for dev environments, if we make use of the webpack live
reloader in the future.
Note that the following features have been removed as they don't appear to be
necessary when using Webpack:
- UMD module generation
- thirdparty dist file copying
LeftAndMain.js deps: Without it, ssui.core.js gets loaded too late,
which leads e.g. to buttons being initialised without this added behaviour.
