cat-dataset VS parcel

Have a go at petswitch.com if you wish... I made the original Petswitch almost ten years ago, and it's had mild success since then, including CNET writing an article about it and it receiving the prestigious honour of 'most useless website' in week 41 of 2018, as determined by theuselesswebindex.com. Aside from the obvious question of why I even made this, it was getting pretty creaky – I originally built it with PHP and ImageMagick, with the facial features being manually selected via jQuery UI. So I decided to rebuild the whole thing with a full face-to-pet ML pipeline, on static hosting. To get the human face features, the app renders the upload to a temporary img element. This is a handy way to orient the image correctly via the browser, and saves having to deal with EXIF data. It's then resized, rendered to a canvas element, converted to a base64 string, then sent via fetch to Google's Cloud Vision API, which returns landmark coordinates of the face. I use these coordinates to correct any tilt on the face, mask the eyes and mouth via a mask image, then store each masked element as an additional canvas. Detecting pet faces was trickier. Google, Amazon and Microsoft all offer object detection APIs via transfer learning, and the approach is largely the same: you supply a series of images with bounding boxes around the objects you want to detect, either added via a web interface or uploaded via their API. You train a model online from these supplied images, then the service will return the estimated coordinates of any detected objects in an uploaded image. I found a dataset of both cats and dogs that had been labelled with landmarks on their faces, then wrote a script to convert the landmarks into bounding boxes around their eyes and nose, the dimensions based on a simple formula around the distance between the eyes in each image. All in all it's been trained on about 17,000 images of cats and dogs, and the accuracy seems to be pretty good. I was pleased to discover it actually works pretty well on other pets too. I've also added some friendly pets to the Petswitch family for those that don't have a pet on hand. I decided not to use a framework for this, it's written from scratch using a series of ES6 modules – although I did use Konva to handle the manual selection of facial features if the API can't detect a face. I used ParcelJS as my task runner, and my detection APIs are hosted on Firebase Cloud Functions. Let me know if you have any questions, although I can offer no good explanation for why I created this monstrosity...

It runs using Parcel, very simple and easy to setup. The app has 3 files:

Homepage: https://parceljs.org/

In the Changelog Podcast episode referenced above, Dan Abramov alluded to Parcel working on RSC support as well. I couldn’t find much to back up that claim aside from a GitHub issue discussing directives and a social media post by Devon Govett (creator of Parcel), so I can’t say for sure if Parcel is currently a viable option for developing with RSCs.

Parcel 2 emphasizes a zero-configuration approach to bundling web applications. It's a powerful tool that offers a hassle-free developer experience, focusing on simplicity and speed.

Once you build a simple Vite backend integration, try not to complicate Vite's configuration unless you absolutely must. Vite has become one of the most popular bundlers in the frontend space, but it wasn't the first and it certainly won't be the last. In my 7 years of building for the web, I've used Grunt, Gulp, Webpack, esbuild, and Parcel. Snowpack and Rome came-and-went before I ever had a chance to try them. Bun is vying for the spot of The New Hotness in bundling, Rome has been forked into Biome, and Vercel is building a Rust-based Webpack alternative.

Parcel

I’ve tried something similar on the frontend side: I decided to build a UI for Ollama.ai using only HTML, CSS, and JS (Single-Page Application). The goal is to learn something new and have zero runtime dependencies on other projects and NPM modules. Only Node and Parcel.js (https://parceljs.org/) are needed during development for serving files, bundling, etc. The only runtime dependency is a modern browser.

Here's what I have found so far:

- JavaScript (vanilla) is a viable alternative to React.js

Besides Webpack, there are many other popular web bundlers available, such as Parcel, Esbuild, Rollup, and more. They all have their own unique features and strengths, and you should make your decision based on the needs and requirements of your specific project. Please refer to their official websites for details.

In the Node.js ecosystem, bundling is typically handled by third-party tools rather than Node.js itself. Some of the most popular bundlers in the Node.js world include Webpack, Rollup, and Parcel, offering features like code splitting, tree shaking, and hot module replacement.

There are projects attempting to do more things. I've really enjoyed Parcel (https://parceljs.org). But it won't handle things like linting or unit testing, which you may or may not want. Vite is also pretty popular (https://vitejs.dev/), and it has a test runner.

Thing is, most of the problems described in the post aren't related to low-JS front-end libraries like HTMX or alpine. You can write React without a linter, bundler, build tool, unit testing, or linting. But with any of these projects at scale, you start wanting more:

- If you want to write unit tests in JS, you need to choose a test runner (probably Jest or Vitest -- until the built-in node testing module becomes more common).

- If you want linting, you need a linter (probably Eslint). If you want type safety, you need a type checker (probably Typescript).

- If you want to create smaller JS files to ship to production and to automatically handle assets, you need a bundler.

- If you want to use new language features while supporting old browsers, you need polyfills.

- If you want to use all these things together, you need something to bring it together (like Webpack).

So it really depends what you need! You may not need any. But as you can imagine, in many professional projects with multiple developers it's very nice to have unit tests, linting, and type checking :) (And you start caring about end-user performance a lot more, in which case optimizing the shipped bundle is important.)

Take all that, and then compare to a language like Rust, which has most of the "ecosystem stuff" built-in. In Rust, you get the test runner, the linter, dependency manager, type checker, and documentation tool all included. Easy! Thankfully, Rust doesn't have to care about whether users support modern language features (because it compiles down to lower code ahead of time), or whether the binary shipped to the client is optimally organized for downloading immediately over the internet.

It's a problem in JS because A) you have to care about more problems than many other languages since JS needs to load instantly over the wire in a web browser, and B) there is a huge amount of choice and not a lot of standardization in web tools. (And what standardization there is (Node, npm), there are still competitors trying to even further reduce the pain points.)

I think that in ten more years, we'll be in a better place, because there is push back (like this post!) against these problems, which will encourage more tools trying to solve the explosion of tools. Which seems counterintuitive, but these tools were created to solve very real problems. So I see it as a pendulum which has swung too far, but will likely swing back to a more balanced place. And you see that with tools like Vite gaining popularity.