move to using webdev to develop

[devoncarew]

We currently use grind serve-custom-backend to build and serve the app when developing; we should probably move to using webdev serve; it has a faster iteration cycle.

[domesticmouse]

I'm wondering how to integrate the custom build steps that grind runs into webdev serve. Any hints?

[devoncarew]

I haven't looked into it, but perhaps:

• is it possible to drive custom build steps from build_runner?
• do we still need the custom steps (I think it's largely used to concatenate files for the polymer UI)?

[domesticmouse]

I've done an initial investigation, and it looks like this is blocked on a bunch of other work.

I tried removing vulcanize as a first step towards being able to wrap up tasks in build_runner compliant format, but we need vulcanize to remove http imports from our source, which is being removed from Chrome in M75.

I tried doing a grind build followed by webdev, but that winds up throwing errors in webdev's injected client.js.

In short, getting this codebase clean enough to work with webdev is going to require a lot of yak shaving.

[RedBrogdon]

By "http imports," do you mean HTML imports? Are these the ones for Polymer we're talking about, in other words?

[domesticmouse]

Yup

[parlough]

Since with #2808 we're using Flutter to build the UI, we've been using its tooling appropriately and are no longer using build_runner or webdev.