labelflow VS esbuild

It is launch day for us at LabelFlow, the open platform for image labeling, would be great to get your feedback on this major update for us.

We are hosting image datasets on our platform and until recently the stored datasets were relatively small (several hundreds of images, few GB) so we only offered the possibility to export zip files containing images and labels in the COCO or YOLO format. As the average size of the datasets is growing, it's not convenient anymore to export a zip.

SWC in NextJS is still in canary with experimental settings, but it took me 3 lines of code yesterday to make it work on a fairly large app ( https://labelflow.ai ). Hot reload times instantly went from 10s to 1s. Twitter discussion here https://twitter.com/vlecrubier/status/1448371633673187329?s=...

Overall I’m pretty bullish on Rust tooling and integration within the JS/ Wasm ecosystem !

Check labelflow.ai. It's free, the code is published, web UI is super simple and the images do not need to be uploaded on remote servers so you get started in no time. For classification you would press the 1 key if image has hotdog else right key to go to the next image. Not gonna lie, you're going to need a bit of time for 10k images but definitely doable alone on a simple use case like that. To be fully transparent, I work there! Classification features are still in beta they will be released in 2 weeks. Happy labeling!

I’ve used storybook for 4 years in teams of 1-15 devs and I’d say it’s a must have for any serious react app with 3+ full time developers. It has its rough edges sure but the ROI is 10x nonetheless in my experiences.

Advantages

- Testing components in isolation forces some good practices and allows to keep the codebase in check by encouraging good practices (limited coupling of unrelated parts of the codebase

- It’s super productive because it is both a form of unit tests, useful during development of UX in « TDD mode », and a very good documentation of your UI components. It greatly reduces the effort needed for both these aspects.

- For DX, the hot reload is generally faster in storybook than in the App (except if you use vite/snowpack in your app, so far..) because reloading a single component is faster than reloading the whole app and its state. In a large CRA our hot reload could sometimes take up 1min in complex cases, while storybook was taking 3s.

- Coupled with Chromatic (their hosted platform) and its GitHub integration it makes QA and visual regression testing a joy, 10x faster than alternatives, I really recommend that.

- It allows to share/iterate easily your ongoing developments with non-tech people in your organisation at early stage. A very good bridge between Figma and the final UI. A good support during Daily meetings about UI, just shared the deployed story url to ask for feedback.

Drawbacks

- It has its own Webpack config. So if you have a custom Webpack config in your app (don’t do that anyway, unless absolutely necessary) then be prepared to duplicate the customizations in your storybook config

- Global React Contexts needs to be duplicated in your storybook config and, if necessary, configured for individual stories. For example if your signup button changes based on an Auth status stored in a global context, then you will have to use Story.parameters to customize the content of the Auth context.

- We had a couple instances where storybook was the limiting factor for us to embrace some new/fancy tech, like yarn v2 or service worker. However maybe that’s a good litmus test: things that storybook support are state of the art JS and generally safe to use. Things that storybook does not support out of the box will cause you problems with other tools anyway: if it’s not storybook, some other tool like Cypress, Jest, Next, or some browsers will cause you trouble with your “shiny new tech”

- It can be slow to startup. We had a storybook with 300+ complex stories and it took 5min to startup and 10min to build in the CI

- It had some API changes/ migration pains a couple years back. However I think the new API is very good and will last a long time so this is behind.

Overall I definitely advocate to use storybook, especially with Chromatic, the ROI is 10x. If you find yourself limited by it in 2021 despite configuring it, maybe question your own tech stack.

Don’t try to implement your own storybook copycat (we had a colleague develop an alternative https://github.com/remorses/vitro , but i think it was not worth the effort)

If you want to see a state of the art repo in NextJS that uses storybook extensively with some customizations, check https://github.com/Labelflow/labelflow/

As a matter of fact, LabelFlow uses a service worker exactly to avoid sending your data to a server (your data is stored in the local service worker instead). The code of this service worker is there: https://github.com/labelflow/labelflow/blob/main/typescript/web/src/worker/index.ts . You won't find any privacy-defeating stuff in there. It's super simple.

What was then just a landing page is now a product that you can try for free with no login required, the code is also publicly available on GitHub. (https://github.com/Labelflow/labelflow/).

4 months ago we announced Labelflow (https://www.labelflow.ai/), the open image annotation and dataset cleaning platform.

What was then just a landing page is now a product that you can try for free with no login required, the code is also publicly available on GitHub. (https://github.com/Labelflow/labelflow/).

In this first version, we are releasing your most wanted features: a straightforward online image annotation tool. For privacy concerns, your images are never uploaded to our server! You can create bounding boxes, polygons, export labels to COCO format and we added plenty of keyboard shortcuts for productivity!

We’re excited to hear your feedback, tell us what features would make your life easier (https://labelflow.canny.io/feature-requests) and upvote what you would like us to build. Stay tuned, It’s just the beginning of a long story.

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.