Hi Florian, The reason for using importLibrary is for maintainability and was done under OFBIZ-11799. Beside those you have listed, there is also JS libraries like jstree, readmore, fjTimer, cookies, moments. Before the change, it was often unclear where and when the JS/CSS were used and how they are related to each other. IMHO, moving the JS/CSS libraries close to where they are used and only loads them when needed, makes it easier to test the functionalities.
Even though unused JS/CSS included in the pages will be cached in subsequent page load, there is still cost to the browser as it need to process those unused JS/CSS. Regards, James On 2022/05/25 13:19:45 Florian Motteau wrote: > Hi all, > > I am currently working on replacing jGrowl (notification library) for a > client project. > > I came across the importLibrary function in OfbizUtil.js (common-theme), > which loads external JS/CSS files when needed. If I understand > correctly, some of the JS libraries (inputmask, elrte, datetimepicker, > jquerytimer, jeditable, jgrowl) are loaded dynamically only when needed > (if the page contains a UI element handled by an external library). > > Is the main reason behind this mechanism is to avoid loading uneeded > files ? If so, I am not sure that the cons of this approch are worth the > pros, but of course I may miss something her :). > > The pros : > > * avoid the initial loading of ~10 JS files that may be useless for > the current page. However the time saved on page load is certainly > negligeable, > * do I miss something here ? > > The cons (in my opinion) : > > * we need to specify loaded JS full paths in various places in > OfbizUtil.js (vs raw list in Theme.xml), impacts > readability/maintainability (IMHO), we should not have to scan > OfbizUtils.js to upgrade a JS library, > * it appears that we need to handle a minimal cache system, instead of > relying on native browser cache (eg for each date input we trigger a > library load) > * when loading a form through ajax for example, the user may > experience the loading time while he is in the middle of an > interaction (vs initial page load) > > To cope with a large number of JS/CSS files required, another approach > could be to setup a bundler (similar to webpack for example), to produce > a unique optimized file. This is not trivial though. The first step may > be to switch to regular script inclusion (Theme.xml). > > What do you think ? >
