Building better in the world of build tools!

Build tools are an integral part of modern web development, making it possible to build great apps that are bandwidth-friendly and delivered as-needed. However, it's surprisingly difficult to choose and configure build tools in a way that produces consistent and good results. We're often forced to make tradeoff decisions in our tooling, which can stand in the way of delivering the best possible applications on the web.

We developed a guide to help you choose tools which are best suited for your next project with example of how to set one up. Come find out how we defined what's the best tool for a job and how we investigated and tested each one.

Resources:

Related Playlist:

Speaker:
Mariko Kosaka

[MacoveiVlad]

I guess it is appropriate to share my (limited) experience with bundlers here.

I decided to make a small project with Vue and Lumen to play with some new (to me) technologies, build tools among others. Also a major goal was to get as little false errors in VSCode as possible.

After switching to TypeScript to help the editor better understand the project the build started failing. I think the problem had something to do with Laravel Mix using a older version of Webpack and not being able to compile the latest TypeScript version. After trying to diagnose and fix this error for several hours I remembered hearing Jake and Surma talking about Parcel and it's ease of use on the HTTP 203 podcast.

Switching to Parcel I was able to create a bundle in about two hours. The main difficulty I encountered is that Parcel prefers a html file as the entry point but Lumen does some magic and serves the view from the resources folder, I solved this by passing the main.ts as entry point and routing the output to 'public'. I'm quite pleased with it's ease of use. I guess Parcel had the advantage of learning from the shortcoming of Webpack and other earlier bundlers.

[eliteethn]

I'm curious how the new kind of build tools like snowpack and vite compare to this list.

[ihtusernams]

I'm glad I'm not the only one that had webpack experience.

[DenisTRUFFAUT]

Google Cloud Storage says it is better for throughput if the file name starts with the hash (because sharding). Just saying.

[hngbv]

I think the complexity of build tools should be reduce.
I mean It just a way to deal with the lack of structure of Js and web assets itself.
In the future, I hope we can do it entirely on the web or at least we have a standard way to build it.

Currently, the complexity is inevitable as many people said.

[kmcat]

What are those graphics Adam has on the wall at 11:15

[faosparkNeo]

Complexity is inevitable but dont make it border Chaos. seriously though the plurality of build tools not necessarily a good thing. It is a doubled edged reality