Microbundle VS grunt

I discovered microbundle lately, and I would like to share with you a mini template with the bare essentials and comfort to develop your packages with TypeScript.

For package authoring - microbundle is a handy boilerplate (I would avoid tsdx personally - it’s basically been abandoned for turborepo but that’s not apparent at first glance).

My tech stack was React + Typescript, Storybook for docs, vite.js for build instead of webpack, microbundle for bundling (basically a no-config rollup wrapper), and Google's release please bot for handling release/deployment.

Setting up a modern Typescript or Javascript development stack is a daunting task, there are a lot of moving parts, and sometimes the whole process seems like magic, so I switched to Microbundle. While microbundle handles the compilation, there are a lot of other moving parts that need to be set up to start developing with Nodejs/Typescript (CI, tests, linting, etc). So I've created an opinionated template repository with Typescript, Microbundle, Jest, eslint, husky, prettier, github actions, pnpm, and a bunch of other scripts. It enables me to start developing a library immediately by using the repository as a starter template. Let me know what you think and if some processes could be improved, or some valuable tools that could be added. Pull requests and suggestions are welcomed.

I would recommend starting by using https://github.com/developit/microbundle , as it has pretty good default behavior for generating library output.

Check out microbundle, which is what TSDX started as a typescript alternative to.

I’m quite happy with Microbundle

Pick up Microbundle or something similar.

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.

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.

Grunt

One potential concern with PageCrypt is that it only encrypts an HTML file by default. If you want to encrypt your CSS and JavaScript files, you’ll have to inline them in the HTML file. The same applies to images and any other binary assets; you’ll have to inline them as Data URIs. As with any authentication and authorization solution, you’ll want to determine what’s acceptable for your security requirements. Maybe you’re comfortable with the risk of images leaking but have higher security requirements for your JavaScript. In that case, the HTML page can link to the image files but should contain all your JavaScript. You can use many static site build tools to automate inlining assets in HTML. Webpack, Gulp, or Grunt are just a few that might be useful.

While Browserify was great at bundling scripts together, it was not quite as good at transforming code. Let's say you wanted to compile your CoffeeScript code to JavaScript. You can do this with plain Browserify. However, it is unwieldy and relatively inflexible. To fix this, a new group of tools for the web where born, which focused on running code transforms. These are usually called task runners, and the most popular ones are Grunt and Gulp. Grunt was the first task manager, first released in January of 2012. It allowed for more flexible code transforms when using bundlers like Browserify or without a bundler. However, there were still problems with Grunt, which were solved by Gulp. Gulp is faster, as it uses Node streams instead of temporary files and runs tasks in parallel, as well as allowing for people to use a script instead of a JSON configuration file. This was still not perfect, though, because it was annoying to use two separate tools. This was fixed by Webpack

Download link (https://gruntjs.com/)

One can say task runners were the precursor to build tools which was explored in the 4th stop in this series. Task runners let you automate tasks like minification, transpilations, deployment and using other CLI tools. The two most popular task runners are grunt and gulp.