2020-11-04 - Technical Council - FOLIO Wiki

Spring Way*, a proposed alternative framework to RMB for backend module development

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Taras Spashchenko

Discussion of the presentation delivered at the Tech Leads meeting earlier today.

It's clear that this approach has many benefits and is attractive.

Main question from Tech Leads meeting was "what does this mean for me/existing modules".

For Tech Council, is this an acceptable and even recommended path for new modules?

A mixed system (Spring Way* and RMB) will make things more complicated and cause some extra work, some lack of consistency and complexity. One example is documentation that today comes "with" RMB. Release coordination also becomes more complicated.

Note mod-password-validator is ready to be test released.

Perhaps the bigger change than the framework is the change from RAML to OpenAPI.

1) We agree and accept that Spring Way is an acceptable alternative to RMB

2) Tech Council recommends that new modules use the Spring Way Framework and OpenAPI instead of RMB and RAML but we should understand that there will be gaps in our processes (documentation, CI/CD) for the first (few?) modules that head down this path and the project will have to work to close those gaps.

3) Tech Council recommends an opportunistic approach for existing modules: when work needs to be done a migration to the Spring Way will be considered. A more detailed discussion around a planned migration can be had in the future.

*Spring Way is a FOLIO-specific term meant to imply a group of technologies, frameworks, tools, etc that relate to using the Spring Framework, Liquibase, OpenAPI, etc... in pursuit of developing FOLIO modules

Mike Gorrell