dazn-lambda-powertools VS esbuild

I'm a big fan of TypeScript and in fact co-authored a book about it. I don't find myself using Java or Python much, so while I've been interested in Lambda Powertools, I never tried it out until now. Lambda Powertools TypeScript joins middy and DAZN Lambda Powertools in the Lambda tooling space for the Node.js runtime. Two things that differentiate Lambda Powertools TypeScript from comparable libraries are it is sponsored by AWS and it supports decorators.

The next natural step was to look at middleware such as Middy to decorate the main business logic, and allow these tasks to be defined once and used consistently. I remember listening to a Comic Relief talk about their Lambda wrapper back in 2019. Since then, I was introduced by Yan Cui to DAZN Lambda Powertools, which was the inspiration for this new project.

You might be interested in the logger/correlation ID features of https://github.com/getndazn/dazn-lambda-powertools - been super useful for us so far.

Nevertheless, log files are an important resource to debug problems and to get deeper insights into the behavior of a serverless system. Every logged detail might help to identify issues and to fix bugs and problems. Structured logging is important as log files can be analyzed much easier (e.g. with AWS CloudWatch Insights) which will save time and engineering costs. The dazn-lambda-powertools library provides a logger that supports structured logging for Node.js, the AWS Lambda Powertools offer the same for Python and Java.

During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements.

The advent of esbuild, the native support for ES Modules in browsers, the widespread adoption of import map, the emergence of tools like Native Federation, and the Nx ecosystem all combine to forge a flexible and well-maintained Micro Frontend Architecture.

EsBuild is a relatively new, blazing-fast JavaScript bundler and minifier. It stands out for its high performance, significantly speeding up the build process in development pipelines.

Unlike Webpack, the Vite DevServer only compiles files when they are requested. It leverages ES module imports, which allow JS files to import other files without needing to bundle them together during development. When one file changes, only that file needs to be re-compiled, and the rest can remain unchanged. Project files are compiled with Rollup.js. Third-party dependencies in node_modules are pre-compiled using the ultra-fast esbuild bundler for maximum speed, and they are cached until the dependency version changes. Vite also provides a client script for hot module reloading.

Use esbuild to build the React code into a form executable on both the server and client sides.

The functions will bundle using esbuild. For that, it is required to install esbuild globally:

TSX is the newest and most improved version of our ts-node, using ESBuild to transpile TS files to JS very quickly. The most interesting part is that TSX was developed to be a complete replacement for Node, so you can actually use TSX as a TypeScript REPL, if you install it globally with npm i -g tsx, just run tsx in your terminal and you can write TSX natively. But what's even cooler is that you can load TSX for all TypeScript files using --loader tsx when you run your file. For example, let's say we have this file called index.ts:

esbuild plus Vite is out of developer preview and enabled by default, yielding 67%, 87%, 80% speed improvements for build time, hybrid build time and hybrid serve time respectively.

Bundling with esbuild

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.