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More on Site Architecture / CI/CD / and Repos

We're starting to move from the high level overview and more into the details of our project. 

Architecture
We established that we using React as our front end technology and ColdFusion as our server side. At a more granular level, we'll be using React with Redux for our front end app and we want our server side to be not just "ajax" enabled but a true REST API. To this end, we're going to incorporate Coldbox from Ortus Solutions.

Repos
These two code bases have different needs, and possibly locations, when they are deployed. As a result, we're going to have two repositories: one for the React and another for the API. This will allow us to keep our code separated and cleaner all the way through to deployment. 

For each of these repos, we'll follow the procedure we laid out previously with the MASTER branch being used to deploy to production and a DEVELOPMENT branch being used for active work which is then fed into the Master branch via pull requests. 

Testing
Code refactors over time as do processes. Our CI/CD and testing procedures are going to evolve over time as our app gets more complete and has different needs. CF will have BDD tests run by Testbox from Ortus. Our React app needs to be developed with JS based tests from Jest, Enzyme or other library. However, truth be told, I haven't gotten my head around any of these libraries yet so we're going to use a testing method I already use for front end testing which is Selenium. The library, CFSelenium, has provided a CF wrapper for Selenium and we'll use some work I've already built out to add onto that. By leveraging those aspects, we can use TestBox as the tool to drive both our CF testing and our React testing. This won't be true React unit testing but we will be able to do more than just test the DOM.

CI/CD
CF: One hang up for the CI/CD process is the need to learn Docker. I haven't been able to set aside the time to learn at the same time that I have a project to actually put it to use to get the practical aspects of it down. As a result, we are going to do the first iteration of our CI/CD using simple web-hooks to trigger our deployment and tests for our ColdFusion Rest API. 

React: Originally I was thinking that we would set up our CI/CD for React to deploy to a S3 bucket and attach a Cloudfront to it. That way we can server the static files easily from something "serverless" (i.e. something we don't need to mess with or maintain) and get those requests and cycles off of a server which we do need to maintain. However, I recently ran across AWS Amplify which has a great deal of promise for a low maintenance CI/CD for React. More on that later.   

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