Rollup VS gulp

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.

We use Vite as a dev server. This allows you to take advantage of hot reloading in development and easily build and minify code with Rollup integration. Vitest is also provided, so you can write tests in the matching folder.

In this project I use my favorite bundling tool called vite, It is a fast compiler & bundler, and it uses rollup under the hood.

While not too long, css`@apply is a lot to repeat for every class you want to “compile”. That’s why using Vite and some Rollup plugins (Vite uses Rollup under the hood) I was able to shorten it into this:

Most front-end frameworks nowadays include these features as part of their CLI’s such as Create React App, Angular’s ng-cli, etc. For those that don’t, many will use a combination of some type of bundler like Parcel, Rollup, or Webpack and a browser refresher like livereload. This enables you to write code, save it, and immediately see the results. This in turn leads to fast feedback as you iterate all day in this build loop. The native Elm Reactor doesn’t offer this ability and elm-live fits the bill as a small Node.js library to enable this.

Rollup

What we see, a decade ago, are that many of the "popular" libraries, frameworks, and methods, not surprisingly, have gone by the wayside, a lot that have remained in current code as difficult-to-removemodernize legacy cruft (Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Backbone, Angular 1, ...), and then we have the small minority that are still here. Some that remain have had their utility lessened/questioned by platform and language improvements (jQuery, lodash, ...), but very, very few exist that are the same now as they were then. Another fun historical reference: issue #118 of "JavaScript Weekly" (February 22, 2013) includes a first link out to asm.js.

GULP: Gulp is basically a task automation tool. The file that you create in this tool, is a plain JavaScript file that you can run to automate you menial tasks. It comes under the category of package manager. Gulp is very developer friendly and easy to learn. For more info: https://gulpjs.com/

[Gulp]:

With the pre-processors, you can shrink your CSS and increase reuse through variables. In almost all working cases, it will be an improvement above vanilla CSS. There are also implementations now, via PostCSS, that add vendor prefixes for you. The major drawback is, of course, that you have to compile your CSS beforehand; usually done via part of your tooling such as Grunt or Gulp.

As far as build tools go I remember how popular Grunt was when it was first released, then it was Gulp, and Babel came along to help you add new us features and get them working on older browsers.

Gulp

Support this, highly recommend learning SASS https://sass-lang.com/ once you master that checkout Gulp, https://gulpjs.com/ then use them together,