[RFC] Stapler changes

[James Dumay]

Hi all,

We need to make some modifications to Stapler to fix a class of serialization issues which involve plugins and result in Blue Ocean pages not loading correctly. 

If a plugin’s Action fails to serialize it fails the serialization of the rest response. Just like the remote APIs, Blue Ocean returns serialized Actions for many of its responses. For Blue Ocean this is incredibly important as a failed REST call can cause the entire UI to fail and the blame is assigned to Blue Ocean rather than the plugin that threw the exception. There are thousands of plugins and 1000s of ways to make the UI fall over.

I've written a small document that summarize the changes and it would be great to get some feedback.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AalzfYZ0HDfwtFMUNaw_okWMLaaQ0S5Q1o6L4taevL4/edit?usp=sharing 

Thanks

[Jesse Glick]

On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 12:44 AM, James Dumay <jdu...@cloudbees.com> wrote:
> We need to make some modifications to Stapler to fix a class of
> serialization issues which involve plugins and result in Blue Ocean pages
> not loading correctly.
>
> If a plugin’s Action fails to serialize it fails the serialization of the
> rest response.

This class of robustness issue was fixed years ago in Stapler, but
apparently limited to handling `NotExportableException`; see
`skipIfFail`. The proposed changes sound way of proportion to the
problem, which I have offered a simple fix for:

https://github.com/stapler/stapler/pull/89