Rollup VS browserify

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.

As we iterate on the definition, we are going to want a better developer experience for rebuilding the package on changes. Typically, for a “library” or “utility” style package, I’d reach for either unbuild’s stub concept or use esbuild/tsup/rollup to implement a more traditional watch/rebuild, but in this case, I’m watching a proto file that lives outsides of the source, which breaks assumptions of those tools.

As we can see, we have two external dependencies and one internal tool. In the modern way of packaging our application, we would be of course required to package this project using some bundler like ESBuild or Rollup. But with import maps, we can instead utilize CDN's to deliver our packages and completely eliminate the bundling step.

Vite has a great plugin ecosystem because it leverages the same plugin interface as Rollup, meaning most Rollup plugins are also compatible with Vite. The Vite guide offers more reasons for why you might want to check out Vite.

Other popular build tools include Vite.js, Browserify, Rollup - The bundler behind vite.

Awhile back I wrote about packaging your JavaScript library code into a dual-module bundle (ESM + CommonJS) using Rollup module bundler. Make sure to check it out (it's been updated for Rollup v3!).

While searching for a solution, I came across this issue. Ironically, one of the suggested solutions in there was the initial solution described earlier above. However, there was also another suggestion.

In this blog, we'll cover how to implement a simple login signup functionality using firebase. We'll be using modular JavaScript SDK, which (according to the documentation) provides a reduced SDK size and greater efficiency with modern JavaScript build tools such as Webpack or Rollup.

My go-to front end these days is Lit with web components, rollup, and web dev server.

With tools like webpack (used by create-react-app under the hood), your entire application needs to be bundled in a single file before it can be served to the browser. Vite, on the other hand, takes advantage of native ES modules in the browser to make bundling more efficient with Rollup, serving parts of the source code as needed.

This began to change when NPM came in and running npm install became a quick and easy way to install dependencies. Browserify became the first JavaScript bundler. As its documentation says -

https://www.npmjs.com/package/browserify probably a little old school, but browserify is probably good enough.

One problem was to run jsDOM as UMD module. But luckly I was able to use browserify to compile jsDOM into UMD.

Browserify

I think I've got it: Browserify. Wish me luck!

Module bundlers, which combine all your JS code and its dependencies into one massive file. Examples include webpack and browserify.

Prior to ES6, we used libraries such as Browserify to create modules on the client-side, and require in Node.js. With ES6, we can now directly use modules of all types (AMD and CommonJS).

There are a few manual ways to code split with Webpack, Rollup, Browserify and other bundling tools. But React has provided features to help tackle this called: React.Lazy and Suspense.

It's not exactly an extension, but if you want to run node code in the browser with all the dependencies I recommend this https://browserify.org/