#Why use webpack with react code#
The way we write JavaScript today is different from the code that the browser can execute.
As you’ll learn from this Webpack tutorial, this task is not very complicated, and the knowledge might even be useful when troubleshooting other people’s configurations. If you want to maintain a greater degree of control over your build process, then you might choose to invest in a custom Webpack configuration. But they leave the developer experience and bundle output saddled with various defaults, which may not be ideal.
These templates, adopted by thousands of developers, are able to support application development at a very large scale. Webpack cares about performance and load times it's always improving or adding new features, such as async chunk loading and prefetching, to deliver the best possible experience for your project and your users.When starting a new React project, you have many templates to choose from: Create React App, react-boilerplate, and React Starter Kit, to name a few. It's a tool that lets you bundle your JavaScript applications (supporting both ESM and CommonJS), and it can be extended to support many different assets such as images, fonts and stylesheets. to have something that will not only let us write modules but also support any module format (at least until we get to ESM) and handle resources and assets at the same time? This along with other plugins and loaders make for a great developer experience. While bundlers like webpack automatically build and infer your dependency graph based on what is imported and exported. Old school Task Runners and even Google Closure Compiler requires you to manually declare all dependencies upfront.
However, browser support is incomplete and bundling is still faster and currently recommended over these early module implementations. The good news for web projects is that modules are becoming an official feature in the ECMAScript standard. While CommonJS was a great solution for Node.js projects, browsers didn't support modules, so bundlers and tools like Browserify, RequireJS and SystemJS were created, allowing us to write CommonJS modules that run in a browser. Synchronous module resolution and loading is slow. There are problems with circular references. JavaScript is taking over the world as a language, as a platform and as a way to rapidly develop and create fast applications.īut there is no browser support for CommonJS. npm + Node.js + modules – mass distribution This solved scope issues out of the box by importing each module as it was needed. Now that JavaScript is not running in a browser, how are Node applications supposed to load new chunks of code? There are no html files and script tags that can be added to it.ĬommonJS came out and introduced require, which allows you to load and use a module in the current file. When Node.js was released a new era started, and it came with new challenges. Webpack runs on Node.js, a JavaScript runtime that can be used in computers and servers outside a browser environment. Birth of JavaScript Modules happened thanks to Node.js
#Why use webpack with react manual#
How do you treeshake the dependencies on your code? Lazy loading chunks of code can be hard to do at scale and requires a lot of manual work from the developer. How can you find out if code is actually being used or not?Įven if you only use a single function from lodash, you have to add the entire library and then squish it together. Concatenating makes it easier to reuse scripts across files but makes build optimizations more difficult. However, changing one file means you have to rebuild the whole thing. These tools are known as task runners, and they concatenate all your project files together. The use of IIFEs led to tools like Make, Gulp, Grunt, Broccoli or Brunch. IIFEs solve scoping issues for large projects when script files are wrapped by an IIFE, you can safely concatenate or safely combine files without worrying about scope collision. IIFEs - Immediately invoked function expressions js file containing all your project code, but this leads to problems in scope, size, readability and maintainability. First, include a script for each functionality this solution is hard to scale because loading too many scripts can cause a network bottleneck. There are two ways to run JavaScript in a browser. To understand why you should use webpack, let's recap how we used JavaScript on the web before bundlers were a thing.