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GREYSimplify the updates of Magnolia instancesGREY

Rationale

Module updates and Magnolia updates are currently a little cumbersome; one needs to either rebuild their webapp, and move/copy lots of jar files. Making sure superfluous modules are removed and extra modules re-added can be tedious.
Other webapps have shown it possible since a while to have plugins downloaded from the internet right into the webapp and deployed automatically. In some cases, they don't even require a restart of the application in the application server.

Goals

  • ease deployment, maintenance and updates of Magnolia modules
  • faster spread of updates
  • if modules are easily updated, the core of Magnolia and the bundling don't need to be updated as much, and the modules can really start flying at their own pace.
  • (as a positive side-effect, we might be able to slim the main download's sizes)

Features / dependencies

In no particular order, here's a quick breakdown of independent features:

  • Magnolia should be markable as read-only; module jars should be loadable from outside the webapp folder (we don't want to(can not) write inside /WEB-INF/). See MAGNOLIA-2170@jira and the linked user-list thread for some background discussion !
  • Figure out the server side: where/how do we deploy and publish modules. OSGi or Maven might provide help here.
  • Versions / dependencies: our current dependency system can state a minimal required version (i.e module X depends on Y 1.3 and up and on core 4.1 and up. Somehow, we'll have to be able to also say that module X 1.2 will not work anymore with Y 1.5, which is not something that we can determine when X is released. Sounds like this will have to be marked on the server side ("store"), when it happens... ?
  • Magnolia-core will probably have to remain in the webapp folder: extract more out of core, so that it can also benefit from easy updates.

  • No need to restart the app/appserver to deploy a module update. ("updates are ready: [apply now, silently] or [click here for switching to the update UI when ready]"; alternatively, we could maybe make it so that the system still works while updates are being applied, and switches "atomically" at the end? - or at least provide a configurable temp page for public instances)

  • Secure the update UI (it's currently totally open) - provide a better/configurable page for public instances while updates are being performed.
  • Probably needed: uninstall tasks. Most of our modules are actually fairly easily uninstallable (see docu, it's mostly removing the jar and removing a few specific nodes), so this should be feasible. Provide backup of removed nodes for safety.
  • External/third party libs: modules need to be bundled with 3rd party libs (e.g Quartz with the Scheduler module). Current limitation of our module system is that we don't provide any "check" - e.g Scheduler module bluntly fails to start after installation; thus blocking the complete system.
  • Improve user feedback in current mechanism: missing dependencies should be reported in the ui.

Existing implementations, libraries, ...

GUI

We'll want to display decent module descriptions etc, maybe even screenshots. This implies we might need to add some features to the module descriptor.

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