Add an ES6 transpiler to our build process

[goldpbear]

The immediate use case is to support this module, but having a transpiler in place will enable us to start using ES6 features throughout the app.

[zmbc]

Agreed. Let's use this.

[goldpbear]

@zmbc -- do you think it's important to have the transpiler in place in development, or only in the production build? I guess if we don't have it in development that's akin to requiring all contributors to have ES6-compliant browsers, which might not be such a big deal, but I'm not sure.

[modulitos]

We should put it in the webpack config and use it for both dev and prod.

It should be as simple as adding something like this to our webpack config:

  module: {
    rules: [
      {
        test: /\.(js)$/,
        exclude: /node_modules/,
        use: [
          {
            loader: 'babel-loader',
            query: {
              cacheDirectory: true
            }
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  },

[Bilal-io]

I would recommend TypeScript, It uses ES6 features and even some of the future EcmaScript proposals, it's a powerful tool with data type checking.

[zmbc]

I like TypeScript as well.

@goldpbear why do you think we need ES6 for that module? Looks like it works just fine in plnkr without any transpiler.

[goldpbear]

I guess the minified version strips out es6 features? I was going off the instructions on the npm page for including the module via webpack.

[zmbc]

I think "Webpack/ES6" just means webpack or ES6 import strategies, which we wouldn't use anyway. We would put a script tag here. I think that would work. If there are no CDNs for it, and I couldn't immediately find any, we could self-host.