snowpack VS grunt

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.

Additional features for Bun include a transpiler and package manager. As hinted at in the name, it also includes bundling features, giving you the functionality that would otherwise require another tool, such as Snowpack or rollup.js. It also has a dead code elimination feature through its JavaScript minifier.

Even, there are several bundling tools available, including popular ones like Webpack and Snowpack.

once upon a time there was this thing called Snowpack: https://www.snowpack.devwhich had a lot of promises as vite (rollup w/ esm). So I migrated a project over from CRA to this thing.While startup speed was much much faster, it actually didn't make the app useable. I timed it meticulously for both CRA and snowpack build and found that the TTI was almost identical. I am not claiming the same to be vite but it's possible and I don't have a large app to prove it..

Snowpack.

> special snowflake build toolchains

That reminds me, wasn't there a build tool called Snowflake?

Oh, it was called Snowpack [1]. And it's no longer being actively maintained. Yeesh.

[1]: https://www.snowpack.dev/

Snowpack app - a single HTML page with Snowpack configuration

The first thing we need is a JavaScript project for our app. We'll use Snowpack as our bundler. Open a terminal located in a directory for the project and type npx create-snowpack-app react-couchdb --template @snowpack/app-template-minimal. Snowpack will create a skeleton for our React application and install all dependencies. Once it's done doing its job, type cd react-couchdb to get into the newly created project directory. create-snowpack-app is very similar to create-react-app in how it sets-up your project, but it's a lot less intrusive (You don't even need to use eject at any point).

Snowpack appears to be no longer maintained.

Before you get too deep into Snowpack, be aware that they recommend using other tools now because it’s no longer maintained.

Many web pages use CSS and JavaScript files to handle various features and styles. Each file, however, requires a separate HTTP request, which can slow down page loading. Concatenation comes into play here. It involves combining multiple CSS or JavaScript files into a single file. As a result, pages load faster, reducing the time spent requesting individual files. Gulp, Grunt, and Webpack are some of the tools that can assist you in speeding up the concatenation process. They enable seamless merging of many files during development, ensuring deployment readiness.

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.

Keep scripts independent: Keep your scripts independent of each other to avoid dependency issues. If you need to run one script after another, use a task runner like Gulp or Grunt to define tasks and their dependencies.

Browserify was great at bundling scripts, but what if we need to transform code - Say compile CoffeeScript to JavaScript, for this, a new group of tools for the web was born, which focussed on running code transforms. These are usually called task runners, and the most popular ones are Grunt and Gulp.

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.

Grunt.js is a favorite tool of mine, while it's most commonly viewed as a (legacy) build system, I've found it to be a fairly robust CLI framework for designing local and automated tasks and still actively develop tasks to this day.

User script template that acts as module and tries to simulate imports. I built this to help me develop my user scripts, after learning about Grunt, and I thought I should share.

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.