Open Web Apps, common application functionality, and coexistence with refapp apps

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Definitely curious to hear what @sunbiz thinks.

I think our philosophy should be that these are OpenMRS Open Web Apps, not generic OWAs that could run on OpenMRS, DHIS2, or any arbitrary container. We’re trying to build an application out of coherent apps that form an EMR, not a collection of arbitrary apps.

And we should have some proprietary OpenMRS extensions that we recommend people follow. Examples:

  • Add extensions like “openmrs-require-core-version” and “openmrs-require-modules” that the OWA module should check before starting the OWA
  • Add extensions like “openmrs-app-descriptor” for plugging into App Framework
  • We should recommend (but not require) that OWAs include something like “< !-- import implementation-specific global CSS here – >” and we replace this with a macro preprocessor.
  • We should recommend (but not require) that where possible OWAs depend on a “uicommons” OWA, and import the style guide CSS from this.

I agree that we should publish versions of the style guide CSS to bower, in addition to making it available via a uicommons OWA.

Also, I agree that we should make appframework depend on OWA, rather than the other way round.

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