gulp vs Webpack: What are the differences?
What is gulp? The streaming build system. Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes.
What is 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.
gulp and Webpack can be primarily classified as "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners" tools.
"Build speed", "Readable" and "Code-over-configuration" are the key factors why developers consider gulp; 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.
gulp and Webpack are both open source tools. Webpack with 49.8K GitHub stars and 6.27K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than gulp with 31.3K GitHub stars and 4.41K GitHub forks.
Airbnb, Instagram, and Pinterest are some of the popular companies that use Webpack, whereas gulp is used by Mailgun, Sellsuki, and Movielala. Webpack has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2206 company stacks & 1338 developers stacks; compared to gulp, which is listed in 1163 company stacks and 705 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.
