grunt VS UglifyJS2

Many web pages use CSS and JavaScript files to handle various features and styles. Each file, however, requires a separate HTTP request, which can slow down page loading. Concatenation comes into play here. It involves combining multiple CSS or JavaScript files into a single file. As a result, pages load faster, reducing the time spent requesting individual files. Gulp, Grunt, and Webpack are some of the tools that can assist you in speeding up the concatenation process. They enable seamless merging of many files during development, ensuring deployment readiness.

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.

Keep scripts independent: Keep your scripts independent of each other to avoid dependency issues. If you need to run one script after another, use a task runner like Gulp or Grunt to define tasks and their dependencies.

Browserify was great at bundling scripts, but what if we need to transform code - Say compile CoffeeScript to JavaScript, for this, a new group of tools for the web was born, which focussed on running code transforms. These are usually called task runners, and the most popular ones are Grunt and Gulp.

What we see, a decade ago, are that many of the "popular" libraries, frameworks, and methods, not surprisingly, have gone by the wayside, a lot that have remained in current code as difficult-to-removemodernize legacy cruft (Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Backbone, Angular 1, ...), and then we have the small minority that are still here. Some that remain have had their utility lessened/questioned by platform and language improvements (jQuery, lodash, ...), but very, very few exist that are the same now as they were then. Another fun historical reference: issue #118 of "JavaScript Weekly" (February 22, 2013) includes a first link out to asm.js.

Grunt.js is a favorite tool of mine, while it's most commonly viewed as a (legacy) build system, I've found it to be a fairly robust CLI framework for designing local and automated tasks and still actively develop tasks to this day.

User script template that acts as module and tries to simulate imports. I built this to help me develop my user scripts, after learning about Grunt, and I thought I should share.

With the pre-processors, you can shrink your CSS and increase reuse through variables. In almost all working cases, it will be an improvement above vanilla CSS. There are also implementations now, via PostCSS, that add vendor prefixes for you. The major drawback is, of course, that you have to compile your CSS beforehand; usually done via part of your tooling such as Grunt or Gulp.

As far as build tools go I remember how popular Grunt was when it was first released, then it was Gulp, and Babel came along to help you add new us features and get them working on older browsers.

Minification involves removing unnecessary characters, whitespace, and comments from code files. It helps reduce HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc., file sizes without compromising functionality. Removing redundant elements makes these HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files smaller. Since smaller code files need less internet traffic to transfer, they load faster. Utilizing tools like UglifyJS, Clean-CSS, and HTMLMinifier enhances this process of code reduction. They analyze the code, remove redundant code, and generate optimized files for deployment.

Example: You've got a main.js file that's as long as a Tolstoy novel. Fix: Use tools like UglifyJS or Terser to minify your code. They'll squeeze out all the unnecessary bits and give you a sleeker, faster-loading file.

Minification: UglifyJS, Terser

There are a bunch of libraries that do this, but my current go to is Uglify: https://www.npmjs.com/package/uglify-js

There are many minifiers such as terser and uglify. But, because minifying also require to parse the JS, it is actually possible to use esbuild and SWC to minify the code. Here's a benchmark of the main minifiers.

In my understanding, UglifyJS 3 is the most popular JavaScript minifier tool presently -- it has a very high weekly download too. And as per the official documentation, it supports ES6.

I'm thinking reverse-engineered uglified js code (https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS) is not as impenetrable as code from reversed engineered wasm binaries? The element of plausible deniability is much more potent though, for the nefarious actor on the other side.

Program: uglifyjs Arguments: $FileName$ -c -m -o $FileNameWithoutExtension$.min.js

Apart from terser, you can also use uglify-js to compress or minify javascript.

Uglify