[Diskussion] use of external processors/tasks

[themasch]

I'd like to ask for your opinion or plans on supporting 3rd party tools like babel in the ui5 build tools.

We're experimenting with using babel in our toolchain to be able to write "modern" JavaScript code but keep IE11 supported at the same time. Until now we did this by doing a babel compile step from src/**/*.js to build/**/*.js and then start grunt-openui5:openui5_preload on the build directory (after copying xml/json/properties there, too). This worked fine.

Having played around with the ui5-cli for some hours now, I really like the simplicity of its interface, but would really like to be able to keep using babel.

I could imagine something like a processors config option in the ui5.yaml which contains a list of additional processors to use in the chain. These could come as npm modules like grunt/gulp tasks do.

Is that somewhere on the roadmap?

[RandomByte]

I think the Type Extensibility RFC (ui5-tooling PR SAP/ui5-builder#4) will also takle scenarios like this. You can imaging creating a custom type for your applications and putting the transpiling in front of the default build steps.

Main reason why that RFC is currently stuck is that we are not really happy with the architecture of the main Builder and the Type-Builders.

I'll close this issue to move discussion to the RFC PR. Feel free to comment either here or in the RFC PR if you have further questions or think that it won't actually solve your use case.