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Bower vs Webpack: What are the differences?
Bower: A package manager for the web. Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat; Webpack: A bundler for javascript and friends. A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.
Bower belongs to "Front End Package Manager" category of the tech stack, while Webpack can be primarily classified under "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners".
"Package management", "Open source" and "Simple" are the key factors why developers consider Bower; whereas "Most powerful bundler", "Built-in dev server with livereload" and "Can handle all types of assets" are the primary reasons why Webpack is favored.
Bower and Webpack are both open source tools. It seems that Webpack with 49.8K GitHub stars and 6.27K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Bower with 15.2K GitHub stars and 1.97K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Webpack has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2209 company stacks & 1343 developers stacks; compared to Bower, which is listed in 803 company stacks and 395 developer stacks.
I could define the next points why we have to migrate:
- Decrease build time of our application. (It was the main cause).
- Also
jspm installtakes much more time thannpm install. - Many config files for SystemJS and JSPM. For Webpack you can use just one main config file, and you can use some separate config files for specific builds using inheritance and merge them.
We mostly use rollup to publish package onto NPM. For most all other use cases, we use the Meteor build tool (probably 99% of the time) for publishing packages. If you're using Node on FHIR you probably won't need to know rollup, unless you are somehow working on helping us publish front end user interface components using FHIR. That being said, we have been migrating away from Atmosphere package manager towards NPM. As we continue to migrate away, we may publish other NPM packages using rollup.
Pros of Bower
- Package management483
- Open source214
- Simple142
- Great for for project dependencies injection53
- Web components with Meteor27
- Portable dependencies Management8
Pros of Webpack
- Most powerful bundler308
- Built-in dev server with livereload181
- Can handle all types of assets142
- Easy configuration87
- Laravel-mix22
- Overengineered, Underdeveloped4
- Makes it easy to bundle static assets2
- Webpack-Encore2
- Redundant1
- Better support in Browser Dev-Tools1
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Cons of Bower
- Deprecated2
- Front end only1
Cons of Webpack
- Hard to configure15
- No clear direction5
- Spaghetti-Code out of the box2
- SystemJS integration is quite lackluster2
- Loader architecture is quite a mess (unreliable/buggy)2
- Fire and Forget mentality of Core-Developers2
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What is Bower?
What is Webpack?
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