Unixify Plugins / Leaflet Extensions

[nmccready]

The current implementation of supporting plugins is very monolithic and puts a lot of complexity into the core of ui-leaflet. Myself and @jessertaylor are proposing we de-scope ui-leaflet and come up with a more plugin framework approach so that we can decorate directives, services, and or factories.

This would put more responsibility on individual repos looking to extend the features of what we provide in house.

Pros:

• code complexity and supporting several plugins should go down
• when a new leaflet plugin is added we wont have to accept a PR from someone to modify the core, they just create a new plugin which we can load dynamically

Cons:

• a lot of existing implementation will have to be rewritten and no longer be compatible. Being this is a 2.0.0 / major break this should be ok.
• developers won't have a one place does it all so less of a convenience
• possible performance overhead.. (if designed poorly).

[nmccready]

If anyone knows existing plugin frameworks (javascript) that help iterate over prototype functionality to extend classes .. let me know. Otherwise I am thinking of writing a basic ES6 lib that does this. Then I plan on having a angularjs wrapper to wrap this lib.

[nmccready]

@jessertaylor @elesdoar @zacronos @simison open to comments for sure!

[simison]

• +1 totally yes for the feature
• worth investing time to do properly
• maintain a list of plugins at the site and/or readme

See also https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet/blob/master/PLUGIN-GUIDE.md for inspiration.

[elesdoar]

Yes, I agree,

• I'll write a test plugin for it
• Leaflet plugins ecosystem is a good base.

[nmccready]

Tagging @sindresorhus to see if he has any suggestions as I consider him a expert. I would love to know if he has any suggestions before I one off something.

[simison]

Also @mourner

TL;DR — we're looking for a way to let people easily extend angular-leaflet with plugins. Any good examples / libraries out there?

[j-r-t]

The way ui-grid have done it may be a good example? https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-grid/tree/master/src/features

"Plugin architecture allows you to use only the features you need"

However, instead of the plugins being in the same repo (like ui-grid), maybe they should be in their own and available via bower, for example

bower install ui-leaflet-label

This would be a fork of https://github.com/Leaflet/Leaflet.label, but with a separate angular part as part of the plugin which is the part which interacts with ui-leaflet (thus keeping the bloat down and making sure the core of ui-leaflet is kept as simple and clean as possible). This may also mean we could keep the plugins in sync (I think) with the original if they're still being maintained, else we can maintain the fork.

[eczajk1]

I agree that the plugins should not be in the repo, but available from other repos. That way issues like #117 could be solved by writing a plugin for that API - instead of modifying ui-leaflet.

[nmccready]

@jessertaylor I agree with you, I am just trying to think about the code/internal implementation. At a high high level I think we all agree.

[j-r-t]

Yes, I did give ui-grid as an example but have not had time to give it a proper look over, what do you think?

[nmccready]

Looking at it now; conceptually it looks good; but with all the features being in the repo I do not agree with that. We can have a few features locally as examples but I think the majority should be totally separate. Where we load from a specified angular service. IE it is the users choice on how to fill up that service.

[nmccready]

@jessertaylor your suggested way via ui-grid looks pretty good. Where I think most of the hook in to the core is via https://github.com/angular-ui/ui-grid/blob/master/src/features/pinning/js/pinning.js#L35 .

So in marker label case.

So basically we would extend our leaflet markers options which right now is "markers". If on registering a new option definition that has an identical signature; like addMarkers basically push that functionality in an execution chain to be called with the same args.