Distributing Single page applications from sensenet ECM

[gallayl]

The problem

During SPA development, we are facing some difficulties on how to serve bundled frontend files from e.g. gulp or webpack, or work parallel with a frontend and a backend environment (e.g. frontend served from by an Express/Webpack/Gulp dev.server and sensenet by IIS). I've collected some ideas, but we need to talk about which one should be supported

Serve sensenet ECM from IIS and frontend from frontend DEV server

Pros

• Decoupled, independent solutions

Cons

• We have to deal with CORS, in that case #98 is a blocker
• OPTIONS Preflight request performance impact

Upload and serve bundles from sensenet ECM with Explore (current solution)

Pros

• Works out of the box

Cons

• Depends on Webpages
• You have to upload manually after compiling the SPA
• Cannot use Diskfs mode in case of incremental builds (chunk names will change, you have to upload them manually)

Create a static site for frontend distribution and a web application for sensenet one level below

Pros

• Can be a working solution in both dev and production environments
• Easy to set up and maintain

Cons

• sensenet has to be a top level IIS site, so it is not supported

Create a fallback route in an ASP.NET web app that picks up and serves static files

Pros

• ?

Cons

• The implementation will be different in the case of MVC project and/or Web API project

Redirect OData and Login requests from frontend dev server

Pros

• ?

Cons

• JWT auth uses secure cookies, and they won't work with dev servers as they typically won't support it

Redirect every request excluding OData and Login from IIS to dev server

Pros

• ?

Cons

• Have to investigate if it even possible

[borsi]

The team's opinion is that the first issue should be solved anyway and it would make sense for frontend devs to develop their SPA's through CORS.

So the decision is option 1.