Introducing Webpack into frontend development flow

[lawal-olaotan]

Currently, in knetminer, the frontend development flow requires running the maven build script mvn clean install when any changes are made on the client side, which can be considered time-consuming. To solve this time-consuming development constraint, we should introduce Webpack into the frontend development flow and maven build to allow fast feedback when developing on the client side.

In addition, Introducing Webpack to knetminer current development flow help with cache bursting (the browser loads the newest version of our app, if it has been updated, instead of using a cached version.).

[marco-brandizi]

More in general, the current Maven architecture is way too cumbersome for the current use we make of the code, I've added #719 about that.

Possibly, incremental Javascript builds could be added to that refactoring, if we can find a way to cause aratiny-client (or its future equivalent) to auto-reload the test instance as its files changed (I know the Maven/Jetty plug-in supports that, but I've never tried).

For the moment, one way to speed up things is:

stop aratiny-client
cd <client-base>
mvn install
cd <aratiny-client>
mvn jetty:run (the run-client.sh script has also 'clean', so it's slower)

Also, plug-ins like Clear Cache help with deleting the browser cache.

[Arnedeklerk]

Unless there is a specific reason not to; let's prioritise this at the start of 5.7 to increase efficiency when working on other tickets.

@marco-brandizi regarding your ticket, I moved it into 5.7 too.

[Arnedeklerk]

@lawal-olaotan, @marco-brandizi has written some instructions on how to prototype quicker using Aratiny. Could you try work this into your workflow and see whether it'd be necessary to still work on a different solution? Consider what we discussed that 5.7 may be the final release before major changes and the time may be better spent on other tickets

[Arnedeklerk]

I'm closing this for now as I feel Marco's workflow increases productivity enough for the final minor update before 6.0...