Investigate new build process with more modern tooling.

[apburnes]

Look at improving and simplifying the build process of Pages app and admin.

Acceptance Criteria

• Identify a group of available tools to test.

  • Rspack
  • Webpack (No change)
  • Parcel

• Answer the following:

  • Does it improve CI and local env build times?
    • Rspack improves initial bundle time by ~5 seconds
  • Does it improve developer experience?
    • Rspack slightly improves initial build time
  • Does it simplify the configuration across applications and environments?
    • Rspack is a minimal effort lift from webpack, a large effort from rollup
    • Parcel is a large effort lift from webpack, a medium effort from rollup
  • Does it have a proven track record and strong OSS community?
    • Rspack has hit v1
  • Is it better to do nothing?
    • With minimal bundling improvements for the amount of input, the best option is to stay as is.
    • To improve dev on local, separating the API and frontend watch commands will greatly improve developer experience. When an update happens to the API, the frontend is automatically rebuilt taking ~20 second rebuild. When updating the frontend, hot module replacement updates the frontend in milliseconds.

Recommendation

The other investigated build tools provide no significant performance upgrades and the added tasks/time to implement them are not worth investing in at this time. To improve the dev experience, we will be decoupling the API and frontend build process on code change. See #4649

[apburnes]

Work to be completed by #4649