High level thoughts [WIP]

[rishson]

OK, so just some high level thoughts on what I would initially have expected to be provided in app.

Assumptions

• there is no ordering to these, as in, there is no priority to the features, nor is there any implied importance of each feature
• all features of app should reside outside of this repo. app is responsible for stitching these features together. A good acid test for this, is that a developer should be able to write app themselves by piecing together functionality from other Dojo 2 repos.
• app should be opinionated and help with configuration of common application archetypes, but not contain functionality that we deem to be generic.

Features

[Server interaction]

As an [application developer]

• i want a way to fetch content from a server, and know when the fetch has been completed
• i want a way to accept data that has been pushed from a server
• i want to know when sending data to an endpoint fails
• i want to be able to specify retry strategies
• i want a way to accept data (push and pull) that might be chunked over a transport
• i want a way to store data that has been fetched from a server
• i want to configure serialisation/deserialisation of data that is sent/received from a server
• i want to configure multiple serialisation/deserialisation functions in my app
• i want a way to configure server endpoints and know when these endpoints become un-responsive
• i want to be able to schedule sending data to an endpoint on a periodic basis

[Routing]
As an [application developer]

• i want to be able to configure routes within my application
• i want to be able to fetch subsets of stored data upon route navigation

[Error handling and debugging]

As an [application developer]

• i want to know when runtime errors occur
• i want to be able to send runtime errors to a server endpoint (network permitting)
• i want to be able to run my app in 'dev' mode so that I can debug my code

[Monitoring]
As an [application developer]

• i want to be able to specify monitoring endpoints
• i want to be able to configure monitoring information that is specific to pages/routes/actions and have these messages sent to my monitoring endpoints
• i want to be able to specify multiple monitoring endpoints for my application (user journey analytics, uptime, etc..)
• i want to optionally be able to compress and/or encode monitoring messages

[Performance]
As an [application developer]

• i want to be able to record initial/page specific load times
• i want to be able to send performance statistics to a monitoring endpoint
• i want the initial page load of my application to be as quick as possible

[Offline]
As an [application developer]

• i want my application to load when offline
• i want the user to be made aware that they are offline and that certain features will/won't work
• i want to be able to store user specific data such as user's name and avatar

[Authorisation and Authentication]
As an [application developer]

• i want to be able to configure oauth authorisation
• i want to be able to offer multiple 'sign-up' options for my application (including but not limited to facebook, google, github, twitter)..
• i want to be able to pass data about the logged-in user to all server side requests.

[Alternative environments]
As an [application developer]

• i want to be able to deploy my application into containers such as electron
• i want to be able to run 'auto-update' functionality that will notify the user when a new version of my application is available, and if requested by the user, download and install the latest version.

[Misc - higher level 'default behaviours' - more common usage examples then generic functionality]
As an [application developer]

• i want to offer avatar support where a logged-in user's public avatar is fetched from a 3rd party service such as gravatar, and displayed in the application.
• i want to offer 'forgot your password' functionality, with the ability to capture user credentials and send a 'reset password' request to a server
• i want to allow users to be able to change their own password

[kitsonk]

Adding my previous user stories discussed with @matt-gadd and @Ant.

App User Stories

• As a developer, I need to be able to manage my application.

  • I need the system to be able to incrementally load my application.
  • I need the system to be able to lazily instantiate parts of my application when needed.
  • I need the system to be able to eject parts of the application.

• As a developer, I need ways to describe my application.

  • I need a way to describe my application in a declarative syntax.
    • I should be able to describe it using HTML markup.
    • I should be able to describe it using POJO.
  • I need a way to describe my application functionally (or via classes).
  • I would like the same features and capability in the declarative or functional form of the application description.

• As a developer, I need the ability to manage the state of my application.

  • I need an easy, non-error prone way to change the state of my application.
    • The system should assist me by ensuring I do not put the application in an inconsistent state.
    • I should have easy ways of defining what is valid and invalid state for my application.
    • The system should assist me in expressing invalid state to the user for correction before committing that state.
  • I need a way to introspect the state of my application, in a logical, concise fashion.
  • I need a way of serialising and de-serialising the state of my application.
    • I would like it to be easy to procedurally generate the state of my application outside of the application.
  • I would like the ability to have the entire state of the application knowable so that it can be stored, persisted and restored.

• As a developer I need the ability to retrieve input from the user, perform operations on that input, and either commit or reject that input.

  • The system should have a concept of working state and committed state.
  • The system should have the interfaces to support managing that working and committed state.

• As a developer, I need a set of tools that allow me to easily intereface to multiple data sources.

  • The system should allow me to wire these sources into the application.
  • I expect the system to allow me to differentiate between business data which my application represents and application data or meta data which my application will need to interpret the business data.

• As a developer, working on a larger team, I need to ability to work on a part of the application in isolation of other developments.

  • I should be able to break my application down into logical units which are fully testable.
  • I should be able to specify dependent interfaces of both my inputs and outputs.
  • I should be able to express my dependencies in a way that integrates into an overall build process.

• As a developer, I expect the system to be easy to reason out and help me avoid logic errors as much as possible.

  • I expect the system to limit data flow to unidirectional, in order to reduce the possibility of introducing co-dependencies between units of code.
  • I expect to have sufficient tooling and instrumentation to allow me to support and debug the application.
  • I expect to have a straight forward way of testing my application units.

[rishson]

OK, so plan is to triage all of these next week, and make the wording and level of the requirements consistent. Output should be high level app epics for further discussion.