Gaia/Build/RefactoringToNodejs

Goal

Build system has run on XULRunner(XPCShell) since a long time ago, also requiring Make and shell script to shuffle, optimize or compress files around. However, all features are able to be done by Node.js so that everyone can benefit from the good part of Node.js. Our plan is rewrite/refactoring existed XULRunner-style JavaScript into Node.js.

Profit from Node.js

• Web developers are familiar with JavaScript, also Node.js is the most popular and acceptable for those who are familiar with client side JavaScript. It could attract more contributors to involve and improve Firefox OS.
• NPM is a well-known build-in package manager of node, such tool is commonly used for web developers for years. It will make your life easier that developers can install third-party libraries and prevent us to reinvent the wheel if there is no such library provided by XULRunner.
• It would be great if we build up a pure JS system. To re-implement Makefile and shell script is a hard work, NPM provides a bunch of packages that let us build our pure JS system more quickly, flexible and maintainable.

Plan

Node.js refactoring plan will split into 3 stages.

Stage 1

Focus on refactoring build system core functionality (parallel build, webapp-manifests, preferences, webapp-optimize, webapp-zip... etc). All of them exist certain specific code only use for XPCShell. Unfinished Node.js build script (build/node-utils.js) is already located in Gaia for a while (See also: bug 955988. We should keep working on it and keep both Node and XPCShell version in build system. After completing, we will switch Makefile target to invoke run-node-command to enable Node build script.

Stage 2

Survey appropriate NPM packages and build up pure a JS build system.

Q & A

• WebIDE is trying to make developing Gaia more easily by clicking a button without any command line tricks. It triggers building process by invoking "make" currently. After rewriting Makefile to pure JS module to take over it's job, WebIDE can build Gaia without any dependencies. (such as make and node)

To install Node.js may be a little bit inconvenient. Since Node provides a great installer for all platforms, so it won't frustrate many users to get started with hacking Gaia. After Node.js installed, we can build up new features quickly by NPM and speed up rewriting Makefile to pure JS. On the other hand, try to rewrite Makefile from scratch in XULRunner seems not so easy. I'm pretty sure and still believe that NPM ecosystem will bring lots of benefits more than XULRunner.