📦BlueRain Modules

One of the main purpose of BlueRain is to have all functionality broken up into separate modules. So that adding or removing any feature may become as simple as press of a button.

Moving forward, from our experience with previous versions, it also became evident that code splitting was a necessity in web environments. And with the latest version, we wanted to support it out of the box.

So, BlueRain has been rewritten from the ground up to replace fixed pieces of code (i.e. functions or React components) to BlueRain Modules.

A BlueRain module is any piece of code that:

• Maybe a CommonJS module or an ES Module.

• Maybe the module itself, or a Promise that resolves a module.

Module Types

A challenge we faced in the earlier versions was the different module types in the Javascript ecosystem. We decided back then that BlueRain must support these out of the box.

BlueRain supports both Common JS and ES modules. We do this by checking .default property on the imported modules.

If the .default property does exist, we do module = module.default.

Dynamic Imports

Code splitting is achieved through dynamic imports. All major bundlers (e.g. Webpack, Parcel) already support it. An import function in dynamic import specification returns a Promise.

So we check if a module is a Promise, we resolve it automatically, when the module is resolved internally.

Usage Matrix

The table below list where BlueRain Modules are used internally, and their behavior.

Type	Maybe ES Module	Maybe Promise	Must be resolved at boot?
Plugin	Yes	Yes	Yes
Hook	Yes	Yes	Yes
Routes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Components	Yes	Yes	No
Assets	No	Yes	No
Theme	Yes	Yes	No
Intl	Yes	Yes	No

Hooks may have individual listeners as promises too.