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Modern SPAs without bundlers, CDNs, or Node.js

kofi.sexy

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Re: Modern SPAs without bundlers, CDNs, or Node.js

#71

Post by wildrhythms »

rishav_sharan wrote: post #37

On the same topic, I wrote some articles a while ago. Here is my own approach for making a VanillaJS SPA without using any bundlers or frameworks https://rishav-sharan.com/#/making-a-spa-in-vanilla-js Note that this blog right now converts markdown posts into html at runtime, which is definitely not an efficient way of doing things. But considering that I have just a handful of people landing there, I really haven't…

A common problem I run into is wrt routing, and I see you've built a hash-based routing system. Are you worried about overriding the expected functionality of the URL hash?

Re: Modern SPAs without bundlers, CDNs, or Node.js

#72

Post by giaour »

janaagaard wrote: post #27

What’s the benefit of the custom download-package script over npm install? Why would you want to roll a custom solution here?

NPM will automatically install dependencies and run post-install scripts. Those are normally a convenience, but I can understand why someone would want to skip that.

Re: Modern SPAs without bundlers, CDNs, or Node.js

#73

Post by rwalle »

solatic wrote: post #11

The problem with writing a shell script to fetch and download NPM packages is that it won't do so in parallel. I'm sure that's fine if you only depend on one or two packages, but dependency explosion is practically a feature of the NPM ecosystem, and that'll stretch the script runtime. Not to mention fetching packages that you already downloaded, and no compatibility with outside tooling like Dependabot for automatic…

Not only that, properly managing dependencies would become a huge problem.

Re: Modern SPAs without bundlers, CDNs, or Node.js

#74

Post by rwalle »

janaagaard wrote: post #27

What’s the benefit of the custom download-package script over npm install? Why would you want to roll a custom solution here?

As the project becomes more than a simple example and requires more third-party libraries, this is just unmaintainable.

Re: Modern SPAs without bundlers, CDNs, or Node.js

#76

Post by rk06 »

If I really needed to go without a bundler, my search would start and end with Vue. Other popular js frameworks (even some of newer ones) are heavily tied to a bundler. And why use less popular alternatives when vue comes with official router, state mgmt and devtools?

Re: Modern SPAs without bundlers, CDNs, or Node.js

#77

Post by bsenftner »

pjmlp wrote: post #23
LAC-Tech wrote: post #15

It warms my heart to see frontend web dev maturing like this, it really does. Kudos to the author for putting this out there, that shell script is nifty. One trick I've used is to `npm install` my dependencies as normal but bundle them with esbuild, while also generating a typescript definition file. This gives me one file I can import in vanilla JS but also lets me check my JS with typescript.

Me too, I left Web development when node and npm were learning to crawl, given how things went in WinRT and Android world, I ended up refocusing on Web. So when I got back I couldn't believe how bad the experience became versus SSR frameworks, and gladly focused on backend and devops stuff instead. It is refreshing to see this starting to happen.

> So when I got back I couldn't believe how bad the experience became

Like frogs in a slowly boiling pot, most full time js devs have no idea the shit they put up with. IMHO modern js frameworks suffer from complexity rot; they are so over engineered it is a sad joke.

Re: Modern SPAs without bundlers, CDNs, or Node.js

#78

Post by rwalle »

Sigh... Another post like this. Sure, it works well enough for the example shown in the article, but won't work well beyond this. Bundlers, package managers and other tools were created to address problems people saw in medium-large projects for websites with a lot of traffic. And as soon as the project has dozens of files and even just two or three external libraries, this becomes unmaintainable. Not to mention minimizer/TypeScript/Babel etc that are important for development or distribution.

(Did I mention that import maps was only supported in only Firefox 3 months ago?)

People think they are smart and come up with ideas nobody thought of before. "This seems so simple, why don't people use this?" I'm sorry, that's not the case here. I have been doing web development as a hobby and professionally for well over a decade and have seen too much of this.

Re: Modern SPAs without bundlers, CDNs, or Node.js

#79

Post by jFriedensreich »

The problem with import maps is that external file maps are not widely supported yet and debugging is a nightmare, when they work fine, but for anything that handles prefixes or a bit more complex setups it becomes basically poking in the dark. Instead i still use either re-export files or service worker route rewriting.

Re: Modern SPAs without bundlers, CDNs, or Node.js

#80

Post by rwalle »

qubyte wrote: post #40

While Safari doesn’t support importmap, it’s possible (and not too hard) to use them as a progressive enhancement so that it’ll still work, and safari users will get the benefit with 16.4. I did a writeup: https://qubyte.codes/blog/progressively-enhanced-caching-of-...

Firefox only started supporting import maps in v108 which was released 3 months ago. Previously you would need to use an experimental flag to enable it.
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