What is Webpack and what are its top alternatives?
Webpack is a popular open-source module bundler for JavaScript applications that helps developers bundle assets such as JavaScript, stylesheets, and images. It offers features like code splitting, tree shaking, and hot module replacement for efficient and optimized bundle generation. However, setting up Webpack configurations can be complex for beginners and some developers find it challenging to debug issues due to its intricate configuration setup.
- Rollup: Rollup is a module bundler that focuses on performance and tree shaking to optimize bundle size. It is known for its efficient ES module bundling capabilities and is simpler to configure than Webpack. Pros: Better tree shaking, faster build times. Cons: Less plugin ecosystem than Webpack.
- Parcel: Parcel is a zero-configuration bundler that aims to simplify the setup process for developers. It supports various file types out of the box and offers fast build times. Pros: Zero configuration setup, fast bundling. Cons: Limited customizability compared to Webpack.
- Browserify: Browserify is a popular module bundler that enables bundling Node.js-style modules for the browser. It simplifies the process of requiring modules in the browser and is easier to set up than Webpack. Pros: Easy to use, seamless integration with Node.js modules. Cons: Limited advanced features compared to Webpack.
- Snowpack: Snowpack is a modern frontend build tool that leverages ESM imports for faster bundling and development experience. It focuses on speed and efficiency by skipping bundling for faster builds. Pros: Faster development server, ESM support. Cons: Limited plugin ecosystem.
- FuseBox: FuseBox is a performance-oriented module bundler that offers features like code splitting, hot reload, and tree shaking. It aims to provide a developer-friendly environment with fast build times. Pros: Performance optimization, easy to configure. Cons: Smaller community compared to Webpack.
- Brunch: Brunch is a simple yet powerful build tool that focuses on fast compilation and minimized configuration. It offers automatic compilation of assets and supports a variety of plugins for extending functionalities. Pros: Quick setup, automatic compilation. Cons: Limited customization options compared to Webpack.
- Grunt: Grunt is a task runner that can be used for various build tasks including bundling assets. It offers a wide range of plugins for different functionalities and allows automation of repetitive tasks in the build process. Pros: Extensive plugin ecosystem, automation capabilities. Cons: Steeper learning curve compared to Webpack.
- Brunch: Brunch is a simple yet powerful build tool that focuses on fast compilation and minimized configuration. It offers automatic compilation of assets and supports a variety of plugins for extending functionalities. Pros: Quick setup, automatic compilation. Cons: Limited customization options compared to Webpack.
- FuseBox: FuseBox is a performance-oriented module bundler that offers features like code splitting, hot reload, and tree shaking. It aims to provide a developer-friendly environment with fast build times. Pros: Performance optimization, easy to configure. Cons: Smaller community compared to Webpack.
- Rollup: Rollup is a module bundler that focuses on performance and tree shaking to optimize bundle size. It is known for its efficient ES module bundling capabilities and is simpler to configure than Webpack. Pros: Better tree shaking, faster build times. Cons: Less plugin ecosystem than Webpack.
Top Alternatives to Webpack
- gulp
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. ...
- Babel
Babel will turn your ES6+ code into ES5 friendly code, so you can start using it right now without waiting for browser support. ...
- Parcel
Parcel is a web application bundler, differentiated by its developer experience. It offers blazing fast performance utilizing multicore processing, and requires zero configuration. ...
- Browserify
Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies. ...
- Grunt
The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort. ...
- Brunch
Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology. ...
- npm
npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day. ...
- RequireJS
RequireJS loads plain JavaScript files as well as more defined modules. It is optimized for in-browser use, including in a Web Worker, but it can be used in other JavaScript environments, like Rhino and Node. It implements the Asynchronous Module API. Using a modular script loader like RequireJS will improve the speed and quality of your code. ...
Webpack alternatives & related posts
- Build speed451
- Readable277
- Code-over-configuration244
- Open source210
- Node streams175
- Intuitive107
- Lots of plugins83
- Works great with browserify66
- Easy to Learn45
- Laravel-elixir17
- build workflow4
- Simple & flexible3
- Great community3
- Stylus intergration2
- Clean Code2
- jade intergration2
- Well documented0
related gulp posts
In 2014, PagerDuty struggled with safely releasing reliable mobile applications to users due to some issues with how the code was being packaged and handled.
PagerDuty’s mobile apps are hybrid and used Cordova to share code between platforms. Coding was straightforward but packaging was not, as a separated Gulp-based build process was also being used. The PagerDuty team took a page from Java and started creating software artifacts.
Rather than checking in transformed code or publishing modules to NPM, the team started creating zipped-up build artifacts, which coincided perfectly with GitHub's Releases feature which arrived in 2013. So despite JavaScript lacking a standard packaged app format like a JAR, PagerDuty was still able to improve the build times and sizes of their mobile apps.
Developing static sites like a landing page for mobile app or just a personal resume using HTML5 and Bootstrap is a lot fun when you are using build tools like gulp . I made a personal resume using above tools and published them on GitHub Pages. It was fast and easy, Thanks to GitHub for the free service. All the JavaScript codes worked perfectly after being concat and minified and uglified by gulp and running perfectly on GitHub Pages. gulp created sitemap and inserted Google Analytics code into all pages and saved about 30% of images size by compressing them during build.
- Modern Javascript works with all browsers165
- Open source77
- Integration with lots of tools60
- Easy setup56
- Very active on github26
- JSX2
- Love2
- Source maps2
- Extensions1
related Babel posts
Winds 2.0 is an open source Podcast/RSS reader developed by Stream with a core goal to enable a wide range of developers to contribute.
We chose JavaScript because nearly every developer knows or can, at the very least, read JavaScript. With ES6 and Node.js v10.x.x, it’s become a very capable language. Async/Await is powerful and easy to use (Async/Await vs Promises). Babel allows us to experiment with next-generation JavaScript (features that are not in the official JavaScript spec yet). Yarn allows us to consistently install packages quickly (and is filled with tons of new tricks)
We’re using JavaScript for everything – both front and backend. Most of our team is experienced with Go and Python, so Node was not an obvious choice for this app.
Sure... there will be haters who refuse to acknowledge that there is anything remotely positive about JavaScript (there are even rants on Hacker News about Node.js); however, without writing completely in JavaScript, we would not have seen the results we did.
#FrameworksFullStack #Languages
I needed to choose a full stack of tools for cross platform mobile application design & development. After much research and trying different tools, these are what I came up with that work for me today:
For the client coding I chose Framework7 because of its performance, easy learning curve, and very well designed, beautiful UI widgets. I think it's perfect for solo development or small teams. I didn't like React Native. It felt heavy to me and rigid. Framework7 allows the use of #CSS3, which I think is the best technology to come out of the #WWW movement. No other tech has been able to allow designers and developers to develop such flexible, high performance, customisable user interface elements that are highly responsive and hardware accelerated before. Now #CSS3 includes variables and flexboxes it is truly a powerful language and there is no longer a need for preprocessors such as #SCSS / #Sass / #less. React Native contains a very limited interpretation of #CSS3 which I found very frustrating after using #CSS3 for some years already and knowing its powerful features. The other very nice feature of Framework7 is that you can even build for the browser if you want your app to be available for desktop web browsers. The latest release also includes the ability to build for #Electron so you can have MacOS, Windows and Linux desktop apps. This is not possible with React Native yet.
Framework7 runs on top of Apache Cordova. Cordova and webviews have been slated as being slow in the past. Having a game developer background I found the tweeks to make it run as smooth as silk. One of those tweeks is to use WKWebView. Another important one was using srcset on images.
I use #Template7 for the for the templating system which is a no-nonsense mobile-centric #HandleBars style extensible templating system. It's easy to write custom helpers for, is fast and has a small footprint. I'm not forced into a new paradigm or learning some new syntax. It operates with standard JavaScript, HTML5 and CSS 3. It's written by the developer of Framework7 and so dovetails with it as expected.
I configured TypeScript to work with the latest version of Framework7. I consider TypeScript to be one of the best creations to come out of Microsoft in some time. They must have an amazing team working on it. It's very powerful and flexible. It helps you catch a lot of bugs and also provides code completion in supporting IDEs. So for my IDE I use Visual Studio Code which is a blazingly fast and silky smooth editor that integrates seamlessly with TypeScript for the ultimate type checking setup (both products are produced by Microsoft).
I use Webpack and Babel to compile the JavaScript. TypeScript can compile to JavaScript directly but Babel offers a few more options and polyfills so you can use the latest (and even prerelease) JavaScript features today and compile to be backwards compatible with virtually any browser. My favorite recent addition is "optional chaining" which greatly simplifies and increases readability of a number of sections of my code dealing with getting and setting data in nested objects.
I use some Ruby scripts to process images with ImageMagick and pngquant to optimise for size and even auto insert responsive image code into the HTML5. Ruby is the ultimate cross platform scripting language. Even as your scripts become large, Ruby allows you to refactor your code easily and make it Object Oriented if necessary. I find it the quickest and easiest way to maintain certain aspects of my build process.
For the user interface design and prototyping I use Figma. Figma has an almost identical user interface to #Sketch but has the added advantage of being cross platform (MacOS and Windows). Its real-time collaboration features are outstanding and I use them a often as I work mostly on remote projects. Clients can collaborate in real-time and see changes I make as I make them. The clickable prototyping features in Figma are also very well designed and mean I can send clickable prototypes to clients to try user interface updates as they are made and get immediate feedback. I'm currently also evaluating the latest version of #AdobeXD as an alternative to Figma as it has the very cool auto-animate feature. It doesn't have real-time collaboration yet, but I heard it is proposed for 2019.
For the UI icons I use Font Awesome Pro. They have the largest selection and best looking icons you can find on the internet with several variations in styles so you can find most of the icons you want for standard projects.
For the backend I was using the #GraphCool Framework. As I later found out, #GraphQL still has some way to go in order to provide the full power of a mature graph query language so later in my project I ripped out #GraphCool and replaced it with CouchDB and Pouchdb. Primarily so I could provide good offline app support. CouchDB with Pouchdb is very flexible and efficient combination and overcomes some of the restrictions I found in #GraphQL and hence #GraphCool also. The most impressive and important feature of CouchDB is its replication. You can configure it in various ways for backups, fault tolerance, caching or conditional merging of databases. CouchDB and Pouchdb even supports storing, retrieving and serving binary or image data or other mime types. This removes a level of complexity usually present in database implementations where binary or image data is usually referenced through an #HTML5 link. With CouchDB and Pouchdb apps can operate offline and sync later, very efficiently, when the network connection is good.
I use PhoneGap when testing the app. It auto-reloads your app when its code is changed and you can also install it on Android phones to preview your app instantly. iOS is a bit more tricky cause of Apple's policies so it's not available on the App Store, but you can build it and install it yourself to your device.
So that's my latest mobile stack. What tools do you use? Have you tried these ones?
- Zero configuration10
- Built-in dev server with livereload8
- Lack of documentation3
related Parcel posts
Hi, I am at a point when I discovered I need starter templates to kick off my web projects quickly and easily. I want to set-up my template code with the best or rather a packaging tool that is fast in compiling my Sass code and JS. Should I use gulp or Parcel or Webpack.
I need help please, A.S.A.P
Using Webpack is one of the best decision ever. I have used to Grunt and gulp previously, but the experience is not the same, and despite I know there are other bundlers like Parcel, Webpack gives me the perfect balance between automatization and configuration. The ecosystem of tools and loaders is amazing, and with WebPack #merge, you can modularize your build and define standard pieces to assemble different build configurations. I don't like processes where you cannot see their guts, and you have to trust in magic a little bit too much for my taste. But also I don't want to reinvent the wheel and lose too much time configuring my build processes. And of course, I love #WebPackDevServer and hot reloading.
- Node style browser code75
- Load modules installed by npm52
- Works great with gulp.js45
- NPM modules in the brower38
- Open source34
- Node streams16
- Easy setup1
related Browserify posts
Appitr Run JavaScript ES6 with React Native in the browser built on Monaco Editor, Browserify Webpack Sequelize npm Node.js ExpressJS Babel Flow Type ESLint MobX GraphQL
- Configuration288
- Open source176
- Automation of minification and live reload166
- Great community60
- SASS compilation7
- Poor mindshare/community support1
related Grunt posts
Using Webpack is one of the best decision ever. I have used to Grunt and gulp previously, but the experience is not the same, and despite I know there are other bundlers like Parcel, Webpack gives me the perfect balance between automatization and configuration. The ecosystem of tools and loaders is amazing, and with WebPack #merge, you can modularize your build and define standard pieces to assemble different build configurations. I don't like processes where you cannot see their guts, and you have to trust in magic a little bit too much for my taste. But also I don't want to reinvent the wheel and lose too much time configuring my build processes. And of course, I love #WebPackDevServer and hot reloading.
When my SSL cert MaxCDN was expiring on my personal site I decided it was a good time to revamp some things. Since GitHub Services is depreciated I can no longer have #CDN cache purges automated among other things. So I decided on the following: GitHub Pages, Netlify, Let's Encrypt and Jekyll. Staying the same was Bootstrap, jQuery, Grunt & #GoogleFonts.
What's awesome about GitHub Pages is that it has a #CDN (Fastly) built-in and anytime you push to master, it purges the cache instantaneously without you have to do anything special. Netlify is magic, I highly recommend it to anyone using #StaticSiteGenerators.
For the most part, everything went smoothly. The only things I had issues with were the following:
- If you want to point
www
to GitHub Pages you need to rename the repo towww
- If you edit something in the
_config.yml
you need to restartbundle exec jekyll s
or changes won't show - I had to disable the Grunt
htmlmin
module. I replaced it with Jekyll layout that compresses HTML for #webperf
Last but certainly not least, I made a donation to Let's Encrypt. If you use their service consider doing it too: https://letsencrypt.org/donate/
- Easy and awesome13
- Ultra Fast9
- Light Configuration9
- Built-in dev server with live reload4
- Simple to use3
- Has many pre-configurable framework "skeletons"2
related Brunch posts
- Best package management system for javascript647
- Open-source382
- Great community327
- More packages than rubygems, pypi, or packagist148
- Nice people matter112
- As fast as yarn but really free of facebook6
- Audit feature6
- Good following4
- Super fast1
- Stability1
- Problems with lockfiles5
- Bad at package versioning and being deterministic5
- Node-gyp takes forever3
- Super slow1
related npm posts
Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:
- Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
- npm as package manager
- NestJS as Node.js framework
- TypeScript as programming language
- ExpressJS as web server
- Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
- Postman as a tool for API development
- TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
- JSON Web Token for access token management
The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:
- Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
- Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
- A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
- Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
So when starting a new project you generally have your go to tools to get your site up and running locally, and some scripts to build out a production version of your site. Create React App is great for that, however for my projects I feel as though there is to much bloat in Create React App and if I use it, then I'm tied to React, which I love but if I want to switch it up to Vue or something I want that flexibility.
So to start everything up and running I clone my personal Webpack boilerplate - This is still in Webpack 3, and does need some updating but gets the job done for now. So given the name of the repo you may have guessed that yes I am using Webpack as my bundler I use Webpack because it is so powerful, and even though it has a steep learning curve once you get it, its amazing.
The next thing I do is make sure my machine has Node.js configured and the right version installed then run Yarn. I decided to use Yarn because when I was building out this project npm had some shortcomings such as no .lock
file. I could probably move from Yarn to npm but I don't really see any point really.
I use Babel to transpile all of my #ES6 to #ES5 so the browser can read it, I love Babel and to be honest haven't looked up any other transpilers because Babel is amazing.
Finally when developing I have Prettier setup to make sure all my code is clean and uniform across all my JS files, and ESLint to make sure I catch any errors or code that could be optimized.
I'm really happy with this stack for my local env setup, and I'll probably stick with it for a while.
- Open source79
- Modular script loader69
- Asynchronous66
- Great for AMD49
- Fast30
- Free14