[ovirt-devel] Moving forward our frontend stack

[Vojtech Szocs]

Hey Martin!

I've just reviewed your patch, looks good overall.

Here are my thoughts:

* Jenkins CI fails on patch due to missing dependencies,
  we need to provide following new dependencies in order
  to proceed with the upgrade:
 
  org.aspectj:aspectjweaver:1.8.2
  org.aspectj:aspectjrt:1.8.2
  com.google.gwt:gwt-user:2.6.1
  com.google.gwt:gwt-dev:2.6.1
  com.google.gwt:gwt-servlet:2.6.1
  com.google.gwt:2.6.1
  org.codehaus.mojo:gwt-maven-plugin:2.6.1
  com.gwtplatform:gwtp-processors:1.3.1
  com.gwtplatform:gwtp-mvp-client:1.3.1
  com.google.gwt.inject:gin:2.1.2

  Who will take charge of that?

* patch itself looks quite harmless (not too risky)

* consolidating Java source & target version across
  frontend and backend is nice!

  -> this means we could use Java 7 features
     also on the frontend (Java/GWT) side

* TODO-GWT tags [1] proved to be helpful [2]

  -> reminder to all UI maintainers to use TODO-GWT
     tags whenever we have some GWT(P) workaround,
     so that the future upgrade will be safer w.r.t.
     existing code

[1] https://www.mail-archive.com/devel@ovirt.org/msg00761.html
[2] http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/32135/1/frontend/webadmin/modules/webadmin/src/main/java/org/ovirt/engine/ui/webadmin/section/main/view/SearchPanelView.java

Regards,
Vojtech

PS: I went through GWT-Platform release notes,
found an interesting new feature in recent GWTP
release, worth investigating:

  https://github.com/ArcBees/GWTP/wiki/Release-Notes
  #346 : Map more than one name token to presenter


----- Original Message -----
> From: "Martin Betak" <mbetak at redhat.com>
> To: devel at ovirt.org
> Cc: "Vojtech Szocs" <vszocs at redhat.com>, "Einav Cohen" <ecohen at redhat.com>, "Alexander Wels" <awels at redhat.com>,
> "Greg Sheremeta" <gshereme at redhat.com>, "Tomas Jelinek" <tjelinek at redhat.com>, "Lior Vernia" <lvernia at redhat.com>,
> "Daniel Erez" <derez at redhat.com>
> Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2014 4:11:10 PM
> Subject: Moving forward our frontend stack
> 
> Hello oVirt developers!
> 
> I have prepared patch [1] that upgrades our frontend stack
> to use GWT version 2.6.1 (from previous 2.5.1).
> 
> This patch also updates GIN to version 2.1.2 and GWT-P to 1.3.1
> 
> Since GWT 2.6 features support for Java 7 it was possible to increment
> language levels of all projects stuck at Java 6 (common, compat,
> searchbackend
> and entire of frontend).
> 
> To facilitate emitting bytecode compatible with Java 7 also upgrade of
> AspectJ was
> necessary. This patch upgrades it to AspectJ 1.8 that features even support
> for
> Java 8 which will save effort when upgrading to GWT 2.7/3.0 in the future.
> 
> Most of the changes in the patch are due to upgrade of GWT-P - i.e. changing
> packages of TokenFormatter and PlaceRequest.
> 
> Overall this patch is *MUCH* simpler than the previous
> http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/16739/
> which facilitated upgrade from 2.3 to 2.5.1, and hopefully much less risky.
> 
> I have tested draft-compile, debug-mode and also tried to use the resulting
> application
> manually for some time. So far everything worked (surprisingly well!) and I
> have not
> detected any defects. Of course I invite anyone to test this patch on his own
> since
> it is and upgrade of our core infrastructure.
> 
> That having said I think is comparatively simple and the benefits outweigh
> the risks
> if this upgrade is done at the beginning of ovirt-3.6 development cycle.
> 
> Reviews, comments and testing are very welcome :-)
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Martin
> 
> [1] http://gerrit.ovirt.org/#/c/32135/
>