parcel VS vite

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.

Bundling: Webpack, Parcel, Rollup

Parcel is another popular bundler you can use to bundle Node.js applications. Unlike Webpack, you do not need to write additional configurations with Parcel since it is a zero-configuration bundler. It is capable of automatically detecting and bundling project dependencies.

Parcel

I love https://parceljs.org/.

I've started to use parcel for all my projects: https://parceljs.org/

The simplest solution might be to use parcel https://parceljs.org/

> The zero configuration build tool for the web.

What about rolling your own? Most people that have only ever used CRA, Next.js, or similar tools will think that seems like a lot of work. In the past, it usually did require quite a bit of knowledge about webpack, so you aren't wrong. But tooling has come a long way, and tools like Parcel, NX, and Razzle have simplified the process. Even more recently, Vite has gained an ever-increasing market share.

I have a monorepo which uses the npm workspace feature. The packages can be built with using vite and d.ts files are generated using vite-plugin-dts. Every package has a vite config.

Now, we will create a Vite project using TypeScript.

import { defineConfig } from 'vite' import riot from 'rollup-plugin-riot' export default defineConfig({ root : process.cwd() + '/client', plugins : [riot()], build: { minify : 'esbuild', /** https://vitejs.dev/config/build-options.html#build-minify */ target : 'esnext' /** https://vitejs.dev/config/build-options.html#build-target */ } })

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.

Speaking of frontend tools, Vite is definitely one that we can't afford to overlook. As your application grows increasingly complex, it is not uncommon for a single application to have hundreds or even thousands of modules. As a result, it often takes an unnecessarily long time for the web bundlers to process all of them before a dev server can be started.

I'm for Vue/Nuxt. While reading React code is fine, I found it easy to shoot myself in the foot (causing circular effects or getting no reactivity) in a way Vue didn't. Vue feels more explicit. I like React's TSX for embedding HTML, but Vue's splitting of model and view appeals to me. I'm torn on that one.

Vue's ecosystem isn't as big, but it's an established framework. Both React and Vue feel easier to work with than Angular. RxJS is really cool, but also very comprehensive, making it difficult to keep the entire API in mind. At least for me, who only use it casually (used to use it more while at Google.) And on top of that, I have to know the Angular API. Angular used to be great for Material Design, but I nowadays there are MD packages for all systems.

Nuxt is for Vue what Next is for React: SSR and SSG. It adds auto-imports, which is nice. At this point, I see no reason to use Vue alone, since there's always something that can be pre-rendered. Perhaps the frontpage, or help pages. Since Vue itself provides entrypoints for SSR, Nuxt is more of a file-structure based router that just simplifies things. The documentation is a bit sparse on e.g. the difference between a plugin and a module, and I usually resort to navigating their source to understand things. That might not be everyone's cup of tea.

If what you're writing is a web app, there is also Quasar, built on top of Vue. Similar to Nuxt in that it ties in directory structure, build system and MVC framework. It is also a Material Design UI widget library. Their selling point is that you can build mobile apps, and web apps with the same library. I.e. like React Native. I felt it strays too far away from the core simplicity of Vue, unlike Nuxt, but it's no doubt a very capable framework.

Finally, I'm currently using PrimeVue as the UI widget/theming library on top of Vue. It's okay. :\ Switched to it when the Vue Bootstrap project decided to to support Vue 3 (or whatever the situation was.) I haven't come across anything that's actively broken or missing. The companion library PrimeFlex provides layout CSS. Annoyingly, they've decided to close GitHub FRs, and some (far from all) bugs, and just keep track of them internally. Makes it more dificult to communicate, but I don't know their reasoning behind it (they didn't respond when I asked.)

* https://vuejs.org/

* https://nuxt.com/

* https://vitejs.dev/

* https://primevue.org/

* https://primeflex.org/

* https://quasar.dev/

We don't need a fancy fully-functional web application for this project. We just need a simple web application that we can use to deploy, build docker image and make a few changes to test our CI/CD pipeline. So we will just be using a simple react application boilerplate created with Vite. You can create your own or use any other boilerplate you like. So let's go into our working directory (any folder you like) and create a new vite application. I will be using pnpm for this project and here is a link to their installation guide.

Finally, let's create a React application that will use our backend to upload and download files. The quickest way to create a React application is to use vite, it allows you to create a simple SPA in seconds.

I started a new React app through Vite by running: