Esri/react-arcgis

Refactoring to use @arcgis/core

sebastianfrey opened this issue · 5 comments

sebastianfrey commented

I have the following question:

Are there any plans on the road to refactor this package to use the ES-Modules available through @arcgis/core?

I know this would imply some further questions:

  • Has the current way to load the ArcGIS JS API to be supported any longer (esri-loader)?
  • How much work would be required to support esri-loader as well as @arcgis/core to load the ArcGIS JS API?
  • ...

Thanks in advance for your time and best regards.

andygup commented

Hi @sebastianfrey, I'll let @gavinr answer your first question but I can tackle the other two.

Has the current way to load the ArcGIS JS API to be supported any longer (esri-loader)?

We plan on keeping esri-loader around, and we we are recommending using @arcgis/core for new projects that require local builds. If you have a couple minutes, I suggest taking a look at the Developer Tooling overview in the SDK: https://developers.arcgis.com/javascript/latest/guide/tooling-intro/.

How much work would be required to support esri-loader as well as @arcgis/core to load the ArcGIS JS API?

Do you mean use both within a single application? If that's what you are asking about we don't have any plans to support that coding pattern.

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tomwayson commented

Are there any plans on the road to refactor this package to use the ES-Modules available through @arcgis/core?

There are no current plans for this. It would make sense for this to use @arcgis/core, but there are potential drawbacks, specifically longer build times and potential compatibility w/ some build tools (Parcel, Snowpack, WMR, etc). I doubt those are commonly used w/ these components.

If someone wants to make a PR to use @arcgis/core I'd be open to it. We could release it w/ a major version bump (v6), and people could always use the older version (v5) if the above drawbacks are an issue for them. Besides, there's always https://github.com/tomwayson/esri-loader-hooks ;)

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sebastianfrey commented

Thank you both for taking the time answering my questions. =)

I asked, because I currently work on a larger React application which leverages esri-loader to integrate the ArcgIS-JS-API. So after I had seen that @arcgis/core reached the horizon, I tought about ways to easily switch from esri-loader to @arcgis/core. After some steady runs I came finally to the conclusion, that an ideal way to handle this transition as smoth as possible, would be when 'esri-loader' directly uses '@arcgis/core' under its hood.

@tomwayson Awesome library. In my project I came up with some similar hooks. Sadly this library wasn't available when I did start my current project. =/

From my point of view this can be closed.

tomwayson commented

Thanks @sebastianfrey

an ideal way to handle this transition as smoth as possible, would be when 'esri-loader' directly uses '@arcgis/core' under its hood

That's an interesting idea, but I don't think that will ever happen. I'm not even sure how it would work b/c loadModules() would either have to generate many dynamic import()s on the fly, or would have to have already imported all of @arcgis/core.

Unfortunately the only way I know to transition from esri-loader to @arcgis/core is to manually find and replace loadModules() calls w/ corresponding import statements.

I think we'll leave this open to see if there's any more interest in this idea.

tomwayson commented

Added a message to README encouraging people to use @arcgis/core directly in ba79e95

Closing this as we are now archiving this repo