Use Rollup and ES modules (v2)

[donmccurdy]

Re-opening #113, and adding documentation.

[emackey]

Hi Don, currently we publish this repo as GitHub Pages. The old version is published right from the master branch, but of course we could switch it to gh-pages or some other branch if need be. But will GitHub Pages be able to act as the server here?

[emackey]

Oh I think I see. In #114 (comment) you mentioned that the dist folder is not included in the PR, but will be build and pushed with each release.

[emackey]

If anyone wants to test this when served via GitHub Pages, I published a built version of this branch from my emackey fork here:

https://emackey.github.io/glTF-WebGL-PBR/

[UX3D-nopper]

Reverted, as did not work on my machine.

[UX3D-nopper]

@emackey Can you please try out a clean checkout and redo the pull request?

[donmccurdy]

@UX3D-nopper could you describe how this did not work on your machine? The steps to build and run the viewer are:

npm install
npm run dev

Then open http://localhost:8000.

From the current reference-viewer branch, reverting the revert (git revert 507059f1d5dc1d4f756b1236e161440be38a8e6c) works properly for me on a separate machine than I used to create the PR. If this isn't working for you, it would be helpful to know the error before I recreate the PR.

[UX3D-nopper]

The reference viewer should still work without npm. Just committing the build package will probably solve the problem.

[emackey]

@UX3D-nopper I believe the reason those files weren't included was mentioned in #114 (comment):

Note that I have not included the dist/ files in the PR. My suggestion would be to do that only with each release, and not with individual PRs.

But, perhaps the dist/ folder should ship at least with the initial PR, so that GitHub Pages works out of the box.

Is the UX3D team able to do some testing of this before asking for another PR? It looks like these PRs are getting rapidly merged and reverted. Normally a deep-rooted PR like this should remain open for testing and feedback, possibly for days, or however long it takes for the affected team members to all be confident that merging it won't disrupt their daily workflow. The team would need to make changes to that workflow here, for example using npm run dev for the interactive development server, and npm run build to regenerate the dist files for static hosting.

[UX3D-nopper]

To be honest, if u or Don are doing a pull request, currently I personally do no test it, as I assume, u guys already tested it.
But u are right, we need to test always.

[donmccurdy]

I'm happy to include the dist/ folder in the PR for this, that's no problem. But future PRs (e.g. by community members) should omit the dist/ files, because they're hard to review and lead to merge conflicts — it's easier just to update them when needed for a new version or demo deployment.

Do note that with this change, NPM (or an alternative like https://yarnpkg.com/) will be part of the development process, and should be running in the background (npm run dev) while working locally. Static hosting for the demo is still supported of course, NPM does not need to be installed on the server. It's enough just to run npm run build and then push the files to a location like GitHub Pages.

Once this is checked in I'm also happy to add a hook so that future PRs will display a warning if they break the build script.

[donmccurdy]

Reopened in #123.