rakkasjs VS Rollup

This article is a walk-through of creating a Twitter clone with Rakkas, a bleeding-edge React framework powered by Vite. Our Twitter clone, which we'll call ublog, is going to:

Rakkas uses experimental and/or beta features of React and Vite. As such, expect breaking changes until we hit 1.0. But go ahead and give it a try and share your thoughts. Star us on Github, join our Discord server, and follow me on Twitter for updates.

💃 Rakkas, the bleeding edge React framework powered by Vite, has just released version 0.6.0. First release since December, this is the largest and least backward compatible update so far. But we believe the quantity and the quality of the new features justify the number of breaking changes. See if you agree.

I wanted to share a rough demo of an upcoming Rakkas feature that I'm really excited about: Behold useServerSideQuery :)

Today, Nextjs is not only cool guy in the town, A lot of meta frameworks exist like Astro, Remix. There are a few ssr frameworks also build over Vite - such as - https://vitedge.js.org/, https://rakkasjs.org/, https://github.com/frandiox/vite-ssr,

I, for one, enjoy doing this (I even built my own framework from scratch. But most people don't want to make a shovel first so they can dig. They just want to dig. If you have a hand made shovel that works for you, good for you. Most people don't have one and don't want to spend time and energy on building one. That's reasonable.

Cool. Svelte Kit can prerender API routes which solves the same problem. Shameless self-promo follows: I copied it for Rakkas, a Vite-powered React framework similar to Next.js. You may want to check it out.

We all know Next.js is awesome. But Rakkas does put a few unique features on the table. It's still young and not yet ready for production use but go ahead and give it a try and share your thoughts. Star us on Github and talk about Rakkas if you like what you see. If you have any questions, problems, or suggestions open a Github issue. If you want to contribute, fork and send a pull request. Check out the open issues to see how you can help. All feedback is welcome, positive or negative.

Thanks, cool feature I didn't know about. Opened an issue: https://github.com/rakkasjs/rakkasjs/issues/27

Doesn't Rollup already use quite a bit of rust[0]? It's actually why I had to abandon it for a project, where they didn't offer binaries for our build platform and I needed to bundle, like 2 ES6 javascript libraries so I just grabbed esbuild instead.

[0] https://github.com/rollup/rollup/tree/master/rust

Unlike Webpack, the Vite DevServer only compiles files when they are requested. It leverages ES module imports, which allow JS files to import other files without needing to bundle them together during development. When one file changes, only that file needs to be re-compiled, and the rest can remain unchanged. Project files are compiled with Rollup.js. Third-party dependencies in node_modules are pre-compiled using the ultra-fast esbuild bundler for maximum speed, and they are cached until the dependency version changes. Vite also provides a client script for hot module reloading.

Read the full breaking changes in Rollup’s release notes for build-related changes in build.rollupOptions.

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.

The optimization points are very valid and good to keep in mind, no?

See for example:

https://github.com/rollup/rollup/issues/349

The missing minification of identifiers and properties of the Vue instance in general were always bugging me in Vue 2, even when not using the class keyword.

This is a very valid consideration IMO.

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.

📦 Rollup for bundling

Bundling: Webpack, Parcel, Rollup

Rollup is another popular JavaScript module bundler focusing on high performance. It excels at tree-shaking and uses ES module syntax to generate more performant bundles than traditional module bundlers. In addition to JavaScript, Rollup supports bundling CSS and JSON as well. Rollup has more than 12 million weekly NPM downloads.

Vite (read as vit) is actually a combination of two great frontend tools - an immensely fast development server and a build command for shipping heavily optimized static assets using Rollup. Many developers have encountered the process of setting up a project using Create React App. While CRA can be useful for beginners due to its simplicity and abstraction of configuration, it has some drawbacks that outweigh its benefits, particularly its tendency to be bloated. Don't get me wrong, Vite is opinionated as well, but it's highly extensible through its Plugin API.