Building a Webpack alternative in F#

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on dev.to

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  • CliWrap

    Library for running command-line processes

    This shouldn't be that hard, I just needed a server that well... served the HTML/CSS/JS files right? I went to my desktop, created an F# script added a couple of libraries like Suave and CliWrap so I could call the dotnet fable command from my F# code and make it compile my Fable files.

  • real-world-fable

    Discontinued A Single Page Application written in F# using Fable and Elmish.

    What came up next was experimenting with snowpack and fuse-box to see which setup could work best with Fable 3 and Although, Both projects work extremely well with Fable, the snowpack project felt more compelling to me thanks to the promoted Unbundled development concept. I decided to go for it and tried the Fable Real World implementation and switched webpack for snowpack and the results were kind of what I was expecting, faster builds, a simpler setup and a much faster developer loop feedback with the browser.

  • InfluxDB

    Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  • webpack

    A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows for loading parts of the application on demand. Through "loaders", modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.

    At the time I had been exploring alternatives to Webpack like fuse-box, parcel, and esbuild. Around the same time I was made aware aware that browsers had already implemented [ESM modules], so technically as long as you produced HTML, CSS, and JS you didn't need any kind of pre-processing at all.

  • import-maps

    How to control the behavior of JavaScript imports

    Anyways, I tend to be looking at what's new on the web space, and by this time these... Import Maps thing came to my attention, it is a really nice browser feature that can be used to control the browser's behavior to import JavaScript files.

  • vite

    Next generation frontend tooling. It's fast!

    Also, on the background vitejs was also starting to get in shape, I was looking at Evan's tweets from afar and getting inspired from that as well so I realized I needed to go back and see if I could go even further.

  • esm-hmr

    a Hot Module Replacement (HMR) API for your ESM-based dev server.

    This is the golden apple I'm not entirely sure how to tackle... There's an HMR spec that I will follow for that since that's what snowpack/vite's HMR is based on, libraries like Fable.Lit, or Elmish.HMR are working towards being compatible with vite's HMR, so if Perla can make it work like them, then we won't even need to write any specific code for Perla.

  • Suave.IO

    Suave is a simple web development F# library providing a lightweight web server and a set of combinators to manipulate route flow and task composition.

    This shouldn't be that hard, I just needed a server that well... served the HTML/CSS/JS files right? I went to my desktop, created an F# script added a couple of libraries like Suave and CliWrap so I could call the dotnet fable command from my F# code and make it compile my Fable files.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • Saturn

    Opinionated, web development framework for F# which implements the server-side, functional MVC pattern

    While for a proof of concept Suave did great, I switched it in favor of Saturn given my familiarity with it and some ASP.NET code.

  • Perla

    A cross-platform tool for unbundled front-end development that doesn't depend on Node or requires you to install a complex toolchain

    Whew! That was a lot! but shows how to build each part of the Webpack alternative I've been working on Called Perla there are still some gaps though

  • parcel

    The zero configuration build tool for the web. 📦🚀

    At the time I had been exploring alternatives to Webpack like fuse-box, parcel, and esbuild. Around the same time I was made aware aware that browsers had already implemented [ESM modules], so technically as long as you produced HTML, CSS, and JS you didn't need any kind of pre-processing at all.

  • FuseBox

    Discontinued A blazing fast js bundler/loader with a comprehensive API :fire:

    At the time I had been exploring alternatives to Webpack like fuse-box, parcel, and esbuild. Around the same time I was made aware aware that browsers had already implemented [ESM modules], so technically as long as you produced HTML, CSS, and JS you didn't need any kind of pre-processing at all.

  • Fable.Lit

    Write Fable Elmish apps with Lit

    Around September vite got traction with the vue user base and other users as well. I also studied a bit the vite source code, and even used it for some Fable material for posts. I was trying to make some awareness of Fable.Lit support for Web Components and I wanted to experiment in reality how good vite was, and boi it's awesome If you're starting new projects that depend on node tooling in my opinion, it's your best bet.

  • Fable: F# |> BABEL

    F# to JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Rust and Dart Compiler

    Fable 3 made something I was not aware for some time, it moved to emitting ESM Modules and leaving babel and other stuff behind for users to set up. It was around June that I was really mad at compilation times with Fable projects, After being in the JS/Node ecosystems for years I wondered what could be done to improve that situation.

  • esbuild

    An extremely fast bundler for the web

    Just as Installing dependencies, having a production ready build is critical This is where esbuild finally comes into the picture it is a crucial piece of the puzzle. Esbuild while it's written in go and offers a npm package, it provides a single executable binary which can be used in a lot of platforms and and architectures, it distributes itself through the npm registry so it's about downloading the package in the correct way and just executing it like we did for the fable command.

  • SaaSHub

    SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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