A wishlist/collection of ideas that would be beneficial to support rapid frontend development on the warehouse codebase.

✅ Node Runtime Version

NodeJS 14 is in Maintenance mode, and becomes end of life in April 2023.

• Upgrade past Node 14 to 16 (LTS). Updates to package-lock.json, Dockerfile, Dockerfile.static, and any related docs: chore: Upgrade NodeJS to 16.x #12288
• remove entry from package.json and test setup: Remove unneeded NodeJS dependencies #12379
  node-webcrypto-ossl (used solely in tests) emits a pile of compilation warnings during install. It has been deprecated as of Node 15, replaced by built-in window.crypto capability.
• remove other unnecessary libraries as a result of other upgrade tasks Remove unneeded NodeJS dependencies #12379
• update any other easy-to-update dependencies that we expect to continue using chore(deps): upgrade some JavaScript dependencies #12458
  • Replace uglify-js with terser. Uglify-js doesn't support ES6 without passing it through other transpiliers like Babel, and we're targeting our own ES6 and more dependencies are moving to ES6, making the Babel config that much more complex. Webpack itself uses Terser, as does Parcel and others..

✅ Build Tooling

• upgrade to webpack 5 - chore(deps): upgrade webpack to 5.x and webpack-stream to 7.x #12715
• (big) replace gulp with webpack - Migrate frontend tooling to Webpack #12728 chore: handle sass warnings #12742
  See prior work in Add developer version for frontend pipeline #6141

Stimulus JS

• Upgrade to version 3.x and update code/tests to conform - chore(deps): upgrade stimulus to v3 #12558
  We’ve chosen Stimulus JS as our main JavaScript framework as it’s relatively lightweight, hooks on to HTML data attributes pretty well. The current supported version (and available documentation is for @hotwired/stimulus v3.x.
  We’re on 2.x after I attempted an upgrade to 3, and stopped when I hit a pile of other blockages along the way (I forgot to document what happened, but may try again sometime soon).
• Replace clipboard code with browser native APIs via Stimulus, remove dependency
  We install external dependency clipboard to support click-copy, probably prior to wide adoption of browser APIs.
  • refactor: replace custom clipboard with stimulus #13353
  • chore(deps): remove clipboard, update remaining #13565

A lot of JavaScript functions in index.js are non-Stimulus and loaded via docReady.
See #3144 for an example.

• Convert Change Role code to Stimulus controller Convert "change roles" JS to a Stimulus controller #3144 - refactor: replace change roles with stimulus #12707

Misc

• Emit Jest Coverage metadata during static tests - test: emit jest coverage #12665
• Modernize Admin website - Modernize Admin Site #12747
• Remove deprecated @babel/polyfill and other unused Babel code - chore(deps): cleanup some babel #12758
• Replace deprecated sass-lint with stylelint - Replace deprecated sass-lint for stylelint #12774