Background
Starting in mid-January 2016, the FedX team has been constituted to speed the development and integration of the UX Pattern Library and the UITK. See this wiki page for details: Initial rollout plan for the UI Toolkit and Pattern Library. Our primary goal is to publish the first public release of the edX Pattern Library and to enable its usage in both the edx-platform as well as in other edX repositories. In addition, we are releasing the edX UI Toolkit which is a JavaScript library for shared utilities and components.
Why are we doing this now? Multiple teams are developing edX features across tens (maybe hundreds) of repositories, which means that the styling, utilities and components in the edX platform cannot be used. These two new libraries will provide consistency and code reuse as we scale, as well as providing responsive implementations that are mobile-ready.
What are these two libraries?
- UX Pattern Library - the UX Pattern Library is a collection of user interface elements that can be easily plugged together to build new pages and interfaces. The library defines how each pattern looks visually, how it behaves from an interaction point of view, and it includes SASS to style each pattern.
- UITK - the UI Toolkit provides components for the more complex patterns (e.g. paginated lists, tab switching), both as a means to speed up development and to ensure that they meet edX’s standard for quality, theming, accessibility, and internationalization.
Along with developing and releasing these two libraries, we will be updating the edx-platform to consume them. This will require the long awaited updates to our JavaScript libraries (JQuery, Backbone, Underscore etc), as well as allowing us to evaluate the usage of newer front end technologies such as WebPack, EcmaScript 2015 (through Babel), and React.
Note that converting all of our web applications and views to use these new libraries is a massive undertaking so we will be taking an incremental approach starting initially with new features.
Team Members
Planning