parcel VS Bower

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.

There are projects attempting to do more things. I've really enjoyed Parcel (https://parceljs.org). But it won't handle things like linting or unit testing, which you may or may not want. Vite is also pretty popular (https://vitejs.dev/), and it has a test runner.

Thing is, most of the problems described in the post aren't related to low-JS front-end libraries like HTMX or alpine. You can write React without a linter, bundler, build tool, unit testing, or linting. But with any of these projects at scale, you start wanting more:

- If you want to write unit tests in JS, you need to choose a test runner (probably Jest or Vitest -- until the built-in node testing module becomes more common).

- If you want linting, you need a linter (probably Eslint). If you want type safety, you need a type checker (probably Typescript).

- If you want to create smaller JS files to ship to production and to automatically handle assets, you need a bundler.

- If you want to use new language features while supporting old browsers, you need polyfills.

- If you want to use all these things together, you need something to bring it together (like Webpack).

So it really depends what you need! You may not need any. But as you can imagine, in many professional projects with multiple developers it's very nice to have unit tests, linting, and type checking :) (And you start caring about end-user performance a lot more, in which case optimizing the shipped bundle is important.)

Take all that, and then compare to a language like Rust, which has most of the "ecosystem stuff" built-in. In Rust, you get the test runner, the linter, dependency manager, type checker, and documentation tool all included. Easy! Thankfully, Rust doesn't have to care about whether users support modern language features (because it compiles down to lower code ahead of time), or whether the binary shipped to the client is optimally organized for downloading immediately over the internet.

It's a problem in JS because A) you have to care about more problems than many other languages since JS needs to load instantly over the wire in a web browser, and B) there is a huge amount of choice and not a lot of standardization in web tools. (And what standardization there is (Node, npm), there are still competitors trying to even further reduce the pain points.)

I think that in ten more years, we'll be in a better place, because there is push back (like this post!) against these problems, which will encourage more tools trying to solve the explosion of tools. Which seems counterintuitive, but these tools were created to solve very real problems. So I see it as a pendulum which has swung too far, but will likely swing back to a more balanced place. And you see that with tools like Vite gaining popularity.

My first challenge here was the migration from vanilla JS to utilizing tools like Parcel and React. React, I was a bit familiar with; however, I had never heard of Parcel.js in my life. Several days were spent troubleshooting why my build process was not working on Netlify before I finally found out that I had to set up my Netlify Build Settings specifically for using a bundler like Parcel.js

Bower is a package manager specifically designed for front-end web development. It can be used to manage JavaScript, CSS, and HTML packages and dependencies. It was developed by Twitter and is known for its simplicity and ease of use. However, it is worth noting that Bower is no longer actively maintained, and developers are encouraged to use other package managers like Yarn or PNPM instead.

Bower dependency directory (https://bower.io/)

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.

In this way, all the packages that we add in the require section of composer.json, will be installed in the ./node_modulesdirectory, and their download will be managed by asset-packagist, to see the available packages, you can search for both bower and npm packages.

# Logs logs *.log npm-debug.log* yarn-debug.log* yarn-error.log* lerna-debug.log* .pnpm-debug.log* # Diagnostic reports (https://nodejs.org/api/report.html) report.[0-9]*.[0-9]*.[0-9]*.[0-9]*.json # Runtime data pids *.pid *.seed *.pid.lock # Directory for instrumented libs generated by jscoverage/JSCover lib-cov # Coverage directory used by tools like istanbul coverage *.lcov # nyc test coverage .nyc_output # Grunt intermediate storage (https://gruntjs.com/creating-plugins#storing-task-files) .grunt # Bower dependency directory (https://bower.io/) bower_components # node-waf configuration .lock-wscript # Compiled binary addons (https://nodejs.org/api/addons.html) build/Release # Dependency directories node_modules/ jspm_packages/ # Snowpack dependency directory (https://snowpack.dev/) web_modules/ # TypeScript cache *.tsbuildinfo # Optional npm cache directory .npm # Optional eslint cache .eslintcache # Optional stylelint cache .stylelintcache # Microbundle cache .rpt2_cache/ .rts2_cache_cjs/ .rts2_cache_es/ .rts2_cache_umd/ # Optional REPL history .node_repl_history # Output of 'npm pack' *.tgz # Yarn Integrity file .yarn-integrity # dotenv environment variable files .env .env.development.local .env.test.local .env.production.local .env.local # parcel-bundler cache (https://parceljs.org/) .cache .parcel-cache # Next.js build output .next out # Nuxt.js build / generate output .nuxt dist # Gatsby files .cache/ # Comment in the public line in if your project uses Gatsby and not Next.js # https://nextjs.org/blog/next-9-1#public-directory-support # public # vuepress build output .vuepress/dist # vuepress v2.x temp and cache directory .temp .cache # Docusaurus cache and generated files .docusaurus # Serverless directories .serverless/ # FuseBox cache .fusebox/ # DynamoDB Local files .dynamodb/ # TernJS port file .tern-port # Stores VSCode versions used for testing VSCode extensions .vscode-test # yarn v2 .yarn/cache .yarn/unplugged .yarn/build-state.yml .yarn/install-state.gz .pnp.*

Like this?

# Bower dependency directory (https://bower.io/) bower_components

diff --git a/.gitignore b/.gitignore index d451ff1..0b799e4 100644 --- a/.gitignore +++ b/.gitignore @@ -1,5 +1,122 @@ -node_modules -.DS_Store +# Logs +logs +*.log +npm-debug.log* +yarn-debug.log* +yarn-error.log* +lerna-debug.log* +.pnpm-debug.log* + +# Diagnostic reports (https://nodejs.org/api/report.html) +report.[0-9]*.[0-9]*.[0-9]*.[0-9]*.json + +# Runtime data +pids +*.pid +*.seed +*.pid.lock + +# Directory for instrumented libs generated by jscoverage/JSCover +lib-cov + +# Coverage directory used by tools like istanbul +coverage +*.lcov + +# nyc test coverage +.nyc_output + +# Grunt intermediate storage (https://gruntjs.com/creating-plugins#storing-task-files) +.grunt + +# Bower dependency directory (https://bower.io/) +bower_components + +# node-waf configuration +.lock-wscript + +# Compiled binary addons (https://nodejs.org/api/addons.html) +build/Release + +# Dependency directories +node_modules/ +jspm_packages/ + +# Snowpack dependency directory (https://snowpack.dev/) +web_modules/ + +# TypeScript cache +*.tsbuildinfo + +# Optional npm cache directory +.npm + +# Optional eslint cache +.eslintcache + +# Microbundle cache +.rpt2_cache/ +.rts2_cache_cjs/ +.rts2_cache_es/ +.rts2_cache_umd/ + +# Optional REPL history +.node_repl_history + +# Output of 'npm pack' +*.tgz + +# Yarn Integrity file +.yarn-integrity + +# dotenv environment variables file +.env +.env.test +.env.production + +# parcel-bundler cache (https://parceljs.org/) +.cache +.parcel-cache + +# Next.js build output +.next +out + +# Nuxt.js build / generate output +.nuxt dist + +# Gatsby files +.cache/ +# Comment in the public line in if your project uses Gatsby and not Next.js +# https://nextjs.org/blog/next-9-1#public-directory-support +# public + +# vuepress build output +.vuepress/dist + +# Serverless directories +.serverless/ + +# FuseBox cache +.fusebox/ + +# DynamoDB Local files +.dynamodb/ + +# TernJS port file +.tern-port + +# Stores VSCode versions used for testing VSCode extensions +.vscode-test + +# yarn v2 +.yarn/cache +.yarn/unplugged +.yarn/build-state.yml +.yarn/install-state.gz +.pnp.* + +# Project dist-ssr *.local

# Logs logs *.log npm-debug.log* yarn-debug.log* yarn-error.log* # Runtime data pids *.pid *.seed *.pid.lock # Directory for instrumented libs generated by jscoverage/JSCover lib-cov # Coverage directory used by tools like istanbul coverage # nyc test coverage .nyc_output # Grunt intermediate storage (http://gruntjs.com/creating-plugins#storing-task-files) .grunt # Bower dependency directory (https://bower.io/) bower_components # node-waf configuration .lock-wscript # Compiled binary addons (http://nodejs.org/api/addons.html) build/Release # Dependency directories node_modules/ jspm_packages/ # Typescript v1 declaration files typings/ # Optional npm cache directory .npm # Optional eslint cache .eslintcache # Optional REPL history .node_repl_history # Output of 'npm pack' *.tgz # dotenv environment variable files .env* # gatsby files .cache/ # Mac files .DS_Store # Yarn yarn-error.log .pnp/ .pnp.js # Yarn Integrity file .yarn-integrity