parcel VS styled-components

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

Bundling: Webpack, Parcel, Rollup

In 2023, I had a chat with Max Stoiber, CEO of Stellate, on a podcast to learn about his early success on GitHub. His first open-source project, react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate, gained a whopping 10k stars in just one weekend after appearing on the homepage of Hacker News. This success led Max to drop out of university and create several other popular open-source projects, including styled-components. This library accelerates the process of building styles in React components.

Embracing the styled-components library allows developers to write actual CSS code to style their components. It utilizes tagged template literals to style components, enabling a seamless integration of styles within the component's JavaScript file. This approach eliminates the mapping between components and styles, thus enhancing developer productivity and component reusability.

styled-components: Allows for maintainable styling with CSS-in-JS. Learn more

Over the past few years, I've worked with React apps utilising various CSS-in-JS libraries, starting with styled-components, transitioning through emotion, Theme UI, and finally Stitches. I've also integrated MUI, Mantine, and Chakra in numerous client projects.

There are several alternatives to MUI. shadcn/ui is a modern alternative that is very popular. Ant Design is also a great alternative. Charkra UI can also be used as a UI Framework. Some people suggest just using styled components. Some use Tailwind CSS. Yet, for both styled components and Tailwind CSS, one still writes a lot of CSS. This might not provide the best developer experience compared to using a UI Framework, especially if we aim to avoid designing all the pages on the website.

Website: Styled Components

The project is build using several ready made components available within, Mantine. It’s a fully featured React components library. However some places still use some custom CSS-in-JS so we used some good ol’ styled components.

You can use Media Queries in Styled-Components similar to how you would use them in CSS, other than the fact that you can define custom screen sizes in your theme and access them inside your Media Queries: