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Just vs Webpack: What are the differences?
Developers describe Just as "A library that organizes build tasks for your JS projects". It is a build task definition library. It stands on the shoulders of two excellent and well tested libraries: undertaker and yargs. It also provides what we call "stacks" to complete the workflow of building a repository. On the other hand, Webpack is detailed as "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.
Just and Webpack can be primarily classified as "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners" tools.
Just and Webpack are both open source tools. It seems that Webpack with 50.3K GitHub stars and 6.37K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Just with 1.31K GitHub stars and 44 GitHub forks.
I could define the next points why we have to migrate:
- Decrease build time of our application. (It was the main cause).
- Also
jspm install
takes 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 Just
Pros of Webpack
- Most powerful bundler308
- Built-in dev server with livereload182
- Can handle all types of assets142
- Easy configuration87
- Laravel-mix22
- Overengineered, Underdeveloped4
- Webpack-Encore2
- Makes it easy to bundle static assets2
- Better support in Browser Dev-Tools1
- Redundant1
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Cons of Just
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