[Sugar-devel] How to deploy the webactivity libraries

[Simon Schampijer]

Hi,

we talked yesterday on irc about how to handle the deployment of the 
webactivity libraries like sugar-html-graphics. We came up with three 
basic ways of dealing with it. It follows a summary. Please comment, 
fill in the missing items. It is an interesting item that needs 
discussion and research before we decide on using one or the other.

Thanks,
    Simon


===Include a copy of the library in each webactivity===
Each activity carries a copy of the libraries it uses. For example 
sugar-html-activity and sugar-html-graphics. This has the advantage that 
the activities are self contained. The downside is that for a change in 
the library each activity has to be updated.

This is the current common model for webapps. With nodejs for example 
every library you install uses its own dependencies so that it can use 
specific versions and not have to deal with API breaks etc. If webapp X, 
needs a fix that is only available in sugar-html-graphics 1.5 it can 
pull in that dependency and run on the same system as webapp Y with 
sugar-html-graphics 1.3.

An interesting case is when a library fix is made how to deploy that for 
20 webactivities. This could be made independent of the maintainers 
duty. If a downstream wants to deploy webapp X when aggregating the 
webapps could pull in their latest dependencies (unless a specific 
version is specified).


===Import from a web url and pre caching===
This requires a permission system. This has general security concerns.


===load the library from the filesystem===
The activity loads the library from the filesystem something like: 
/usr/share/sugar/sugar-html-activity/activity.js The advantage here is 
that you only have to modify one place when a change to the library is 
made and all the activities get it directly. There might be security 
concerns here as well.

In webOS the framework is available from the system "Unlike most 
JavaScript frameworks, you won't need to include the Mojo framework with 
your application code since Palm includes the framework in every webOS 
device." [1].



[1] webOS framework: 
https://developer.palm.com/content/resources/develop/overview_of_webos/overview_of_webos_software_developer_kit.html#c20332