parcel VS Vue.js

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

Vuejs

Vue.js is a big favorite for making websites because it's easy to use and fits in well with other stuff. Many people worldwide are using it, and the community keeps growing.

Vue has a thriving ecosystem with a wide range of third-party libraries and plugins available for extending its functionality. These libraries cover everything from state management to routing, making it easy for developers to find solutions to common problems and enhance their development workflow. As of this writing, Vue has 200k GitHub stars.

6. Vue.js

I have got the privilege of working on Vue 2 couple of months ago and its really amazing framework to work with .

Angular is as little innovative for web frameworks as Firefox-ESR is for browsers. It merely keeps copying features from other frameworks - just many years later. It is a chronically outdated framework that always struggles to keep up with its competitors. It would be ok if those were deliberate design decisions, but if the features get copied some day anyway, what is the point? Why not do it the right way from the start?

For example, this update brings us computed properties, an essential feature for any complex performant web application that was made popular by Vue.js 10 years ago [1]. And now in 2023 we get it in Angular, essentially a confirmation by its devs that its lack has always been a design error.

I also cannot understand the "mature" argument. For example, it took five years for documentation on `` to arrive [2]. This is something I'd expect from the side project of a lone programmer, not an enterprise-level framework.

The only upsides of Angular are its "batteries included" approach and the (debatable) default of RXJS, while the downsides are plenty.

[1] https://github.com/vuejs/vue/tree/218557cdec830a629252f4a9e2...

It's down since months. https://github.com/vuejs/vue/issues/11867

{ "user": "vuejs", "repo": "vue", "url": "https://github.com/vuejs/vue", "stars": 201555, "description": "🖖 Vue.js is a progressive, incrementally-adoptable JavaScript framework for building UI on the web.", "topics": [ "javascript", "framework", "vue", "frontend" ], "label": "repository", "commitCount": 3544 }

Vue.js is a progressive open-source MVVM frontend JavaScript framework that is designed to be implemented incrementally since the core library focuses only on the presentation layer. Nevertheless, this framework is used for building UI (user interfaces) and complex single-page applications with modern tools and libraries to support them. It enables you to take advantage of libraries for client-side routing and state management when you need it.