TODO: update and unify ui tooling #326
Description
FPbase currently uses fragmented UI frameworks across the monorepo: Bootstrap 4.6.2 + jQuery (main frontend/Django templates), Material-UI v5 + Emotion (React packages: spectra, blast, protein-table), deprecated @mui/styles, and mixed table solutions (material-react-table, TanStack Table). This creates dependency bloat (~400KB+ MUI alone), requires pnpm overrides for React 19 compatibility (react-is), and leads to inconsistent UX. Recommend: consolidate on a modern, lightweight framework (Mantine suggested - 60% smaller, React 19 native, includes data tables) or upgrade to MUI v6 + Bootstrap 5, eliminate jQuery where possible, and standardize table components across packages.
Affects:
- frontend/
- packages/spectra/
- packages/blast/
- packages/protein-table/
- 27+ component files, backend Django templates.
I'm leaning towards either mantine + mantine-react-table, or shadcdn/ui + tanstack