[FINERACT-1177] Alt. distro? Spring Boot JAR is not great for "dropping in" Plugins

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Fix Version/s: 1.5.0
• Assignee: Aleksandar Vidakovic
• Reporter: Michael Vorburger
• Created: 05/Oct/20 10:21
• Updated: 13/Mar/21 16:40
• Resolved: 08/Mar/21 21:38

Description

While I was working on FINERACT-1127, I've realized that the Spring Boot JAR distribution is not great for us to open up Fineract to allow adding plugins to it...

I've "solved" this in https://github.com/vorburger/fineract-pentaho/blob/develop/run by "unpacking" our 'official' JAR distro, and then dropping the plugin into that.

The reason why we have to do like that is because https://github.com/vorburger/fineract-pentaho/compare/broken_no-unpack_Fineract-SpringBoot-JAR cannot work - that leads to NoClassDefFoundError ... Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: when Java's (not Spring Boot's...) classloader was loading PentahoReportingProcessServiceImpl, it could not find ReportingProcessService - because that is hidden inside /BOOT-INF/classes/ where Spring Boot's special classloader will grab it from - but Java's can't find it.

But it made me wonder... why are we distributing Fineract (only) as a Spring Boot magic JAR Why is Spring Boot not creating a "simple" good ol' uberJAR? Could / should we change that?

Reading https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/gradle-plugin/reference/html, I don't immediately see an option to change that. Do you? https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/gradle-plugin/reference/html/#packaging-executable-configuring-unpacking or https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/gradle-plugin/reference/html/#packaging-layered-jars look like it's adding more magic, instead of less... Would perhaps https://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/gradle-plugin/reference/html/#reacting-to-other-plugins-application be more suitable for us, if we want to "open up" Fineract to let people easily add plugins to it? Or should we have https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/application_plugin.html based ZIP as an ADDITIONAL 3rd distribution (besides the JAR and WAR, which we could keep), instead of replacing the regular Spring Boot JAR?

Or is this a total non-issue, we can simply document how future plugins can be installed, like my run script does? Could cause confusion.

ptuomola aleks do you perhaps have any thoughts about this?

Issue Links

• Blocked: FINERACT-1305 Release Apache Fineract v1.5.0
• blocks: FINERACT-1196 Use Google JIB Gradle plugin to build Docker images
• is related to: FINERACT-1264 Email Campaigns with Pentaho Reporting Attachments are broken
• is related to: FINERACT-1203 Make WAR non-executable to avoid confusion (because it's broken anyway)
• relates to: FINERACT-1127 Modularize Fineract to allow something like e.g. the Pentaho integration to be built and run separately
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #1646
• links to: GitHub Pull Request #1658