🌐 UIBUILDER next steps now that Node-RED v5 is released

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A quick update. UIBUILDER's next release (barring more bug fixes) will be v8.0.0.

There will be 2 potentially breaking changes, hence the major version bump.

  1. Baseline Node-RED v5
  2. Baseline Node.js v22 (to match NR v5)

At present no other breaking changes are in the backlog.

Another important change though will be the move to newer DEGIT versions. This provides the external template support. There was a bug in DEGIT that has caught several people out in that the GIT app was required when it should not have been. I couldn't upgrade though because of the fact that they had moved to a node.js v20 baseline.

Doubtless there will be plenty of other changes but, as I say, I'm not expecting any other breaking changes. I'll let you know in this thread if any crop up.

Other than that, just a reminder that UIBUILDER v7.x works absolutely fine with Node-RED v4 and v5 and with Node.js from v18.20 right up to at least v24 LTS.

Additionally, most of UIBUILDER's front-end code is designed to work with versions of browsers to around 7 years ago. Currently early 2019. This means that the next major release (v9 which will probably be when Node-RED v6 is released) will move that forward. Markweb is a bit of an exception to that since the initial release does use some more modern JS and CSS - please let me know if that's an issue. Future releases will be optimised and will output the same code level as the main front-end library and brand CSS.

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So a slight unintended fib when I said the next release will be v8! :smiley: It was, of course, v7.7.4 bug fix.

The dev branch is, however, very much set to v8 and will stay that way until release.

Initial work has been to update baselines to node.js v22.9 and node-red v5 along with removing the old gulp dev dependencies (which also finally removes execa) now that we know that the new native build scripts are working. DEGIT (for front-end template installs) also gets its delayed upgrade to the current version now that we've passed node.js v20 as baseline.

Now that the ESLINT project has had an attack of common sense and re-introduced multiple config files, I'll be splitting the monolithic config back into more focused ones - already started this a couple of releases ago with common settings moving to a separate include. Much easier to manage.

Over all, external dependencies continue to reduce which makes everything smaller and more secure.

I did a quick test on another node to make sure that migrating node runtimes to ESM works as expected (it does) so I will start to do the migrations on uibuilder as well.