parcel VS SvelteKit

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

Svelte Kit for the fullstack framework It has first class support for Cloudflare Pages Svelte is a very elegant framework, and Svelte Kit is a very good meta-framework for Svelte. Svelte was probably the reason that…

This AI-powered Story Card Maker is built as a SvelteKit application with Typescript. Using Flowbite Svelte component library, the whole application was laid out. The layout for the Story Card (emulating the size of a postcard - 4" x 3") is created as an HTML Canvas using Fabric.js.

Svelte kit

These adapters, for example, were built by the community: https://github.com/sveltejs/kit/tree/master/packages/adapter-vercel https://github.com/nuxt/vercel-builder If somebody builds a working one for Angular Universal, we will gladly add it to our Framework Presets → https://vercel.com/docs/concepts/deployments/build-step#framework-preset.

UPDATE: If you liked this project and are curious to see what it might look like as a SvelteKit app, check out this blog post by Tim Smith where he converts this existing app over.

I've played around with several platforms in the last year or so. I've landed on the following setup that works very well for me and ticks all your boxes:

A SvelteKit[0] app hosted on Cloudflare pages. The repo is hosted on GitHub and hooked up to the Cloudflare Pages app [1]. On PRs, I get preview environments. On merge, the changes get deployed to my "production" website. I write blog posts and other content in markdown, which is then processed by mdsvex[2] with very minimal setup.

Mostly, my requirements were more focused around getting the actual framework, hosting, etc. out of my way so that I could focus on writing. Gatsby and Next.js were too configuration heavy and turned me off once I scratched beyond the surface.

[0] https://kit.svelte.dev/

Behind the scenes is a simple Sveltekit-powered server function to fetch a Spotify client token then find a user's recommendation playlist and its track information. A Deno edge function to performs this data fetch and renders server-side Svelte.

It’s 2024, and you are about to start a new project. Do you reach for React, a framework you know and love or do you look at one of the other hot new frameworks like Astro, Enhance, 11ty, SvelteKit or gasp, plain vanilla Web Components?

From part 0 to part 4, we built out CryptoFlow's backend service. Though we can quickly use Postman, VS Code's ThunderClient or automated tests to see the endpoints working easily, this isn't all we want. We want to actively interact with the backend service via some intuitive user interface. Also, a layman wouldn't be able to "consume" the service we've built in the last parts. This article introduces building out the user interface of the system. We will be using SvelteKit, a framework that streamlines web development, and TailwindCSS, the utility-first CSS framework. Let's dig in!