css-in-js VS parcel

As you might have realized by now, the front end ecosystem is saturated with tools, and unsurprisingly, tools have been invented to partially solve some of the problems with writing CSS at scale. "At scale" means that many developers are working on the same large project and touching the same stylesheets. There is no community-agreed approach on writing CSS in JS at the moment, and we are hoping that one day a winner would emerge, just like Redux did, among all the Flux implementations. For now, we are banking on CSS Modules. CSS modules is an improvement over existing CSS that aims to fix the problem of global namespace in CSS; it enables you to write styles that are local by default and encapsulated to your component. This feature is achieved via tooling. With CSS modules, large teams can write modular and reusable CSS without fear of conflict or overriding other parts of the app. However, at the end of the day, CSS modules are still being compiled into normal globally-namespaced CSS that browsers recognize, and it is still important to learn and understand how raw CSS works.

There are a myriad of CSS-in-JS tools, many of which are zero-runtime giving you all the benefits of authoring in a single file without the drawbacks of inline styles. That's how I prefer to do my CSS with React anyway... Vanilla Extract and/or Linaria are my current favorites.

One thing I think you're really missing is what the output is of CSS-in-JS. There are tens of CSS-in-JS frameworks that can output anything from: CSS Module like classes (Linaria, Vanilla Extract), Atomic Classes (StyleX, PreStyle), to the more traditional (Styled Components, Emotion) many with zero runtime cost (ie no JS bloat). That's why I say CSS-in-JS is primarily about developer experience... the output can often be whatever you want it to be.

At first we wanted to just get rid of all the helper utilities. Keep only the kernel, but this would mean a loss of backward compatibility. We needed some efficient code processing instead with recomposition and tree-shaking. We needed a bundler. But which one? Our testing approach relies on targets, not sources. We rebuilt the project frequently, speed was critical requirement. In essence, we chose a solution from a couple of among all available alternatives: esbuild and parcel. Esbuild won. Specifically in our case, it proved to be more productive and customizable.

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.