Major issues with NPM, are WebJars still an option?

After two months since the upgrade from V13 to V14, I’m still having major issues related to NPM, especially in CI/CD:

1. need to maintain two separate dependency trees (Maven + NPM);
2. for one reason or the other, not all dependencies are detected;
3. at some point the app breaks and you need to delete node_modules;
4. the generated package.json refers to the build directory, which is bad per-se and could also be a serious problem when in CI/CD the build directory is different;
5. also the generated package-lock.json contains references to the build directory, which makes it far more difficult to maintain;
6. if you have multiple modules with integration tests, you start to have multiple package.json, package-lock.json, webpack.config.js, etc. files per each module, all with these 1–5 issues.

Question is: are WebJars still an option to consider? They’ll make Java developers and DevOps happier, especially for having a single dependency tree to maintain.

[Legioth]

We are currently investigating the possibility adding dependencies based on @NpmModule annotations directly to the top-level package.json file instead of a separate generated file that needs to be referenced from the main file. This is discussed in https://github.com/vaadin/flow/issues/7018.

[pleku]

I’m not sure if there is still something left open with the question - the answer was No 😄

Using pnpm (#6966) and the single package.json are already WIP (#7018) . And those are not the only changes we are looking at, but we have not yet decided the next steps after those.

I’m closing this issue. A newer one can be opened or just comment here if there is still something that was missed.