The State of Open edX Frontend - Open edX Conference 2022
Background
This talk, 2022’s The State of the Open edX Frontend, was given at the 2022 Open edX Conference by Adolfo Brandes, Principal Software Engineer at Axim (at the time known as tCRIL; prior to that, he worked for OpenCraft).
Video
Glossary of Terms
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Meta
Date: April 27, 2022 15:00 UTC+1, Room -115
Presenters: Adolfo Brandes
The past
Inline <script> tags, JavaScript and CoffeeScript
LMS or Studio Theme-ing could only work with forking
BOM aka Ball of Mud
A project that follows expediency over design
Micro Front-ends
Instead of ripping everything out and changing it, we just added micro front-ends
Now, one of Open edX’s products IS the codebase, it needs to be better
Replatforming
Incrementally replace pages from HTML to React
But still, not all MFEs are using the most updated React, there are now around ~18 MFEs
However, only a few of them deploy with Tutor (~4?)
What’s Missing
Reasonable depreciation process
Better across the board i18n
Theming, branding, multi-tenancy
Run-time configuration
Stop ballooning build time and bundle size
MFE Directory
Which ones are getting ready to deploy? Which ones are out to prod?
Redux-less
Cannon that handles a mosquito, it handles state
If you only have 1-2 requests to the backend, it’s really not worth it
Documentation
What is the roadmap?
We want to know what MFE’s should do, how they should work?
There’s a big old document somewhere
Q/A
What about typescript?
There’s a discussion in GitHub, it’s usually good, but it might be had to be accessible to people just coming into the codebase
Do we have accessibility requirements? Or do we have annual audits?
Basically, the MFEs aren’t standardized, and if we were to standardize them, it would curb the customization and freedom given to them