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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

#81

Post by drittich »

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…

I really enjoyed reading that, it's always a pleasure to get a window into the thought process of other developers as they evolve their ideas. Just curious, did you consider using event bubbling so you can declare event handlers right away rather than doing them in the after render section? This is currently the approach I am taking, and I'm just wondering if there are some pros and cons here.

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

#82

Post by mrweasel »

dgb23 wrote: post #60
LordHeini wrote: post #31

To go quite a bit off topic. The author says that he starts with a single html file and splits it or incrementally adds stuff when needed. That course of action has proven to be a really bad idea on every non trivial web project I worked on. Mostly for teamwork and maintainability reasons. E.g there is no clear project structure, the next dev will not understand stuff and do things differently. And welcome to the cha…

You are optimizing for entirely different use cases. There are a whole bunch of devs who work alone or in (very) small teams. For this type of work it’s really more of a hindrance to have an imposed structure and tooling. We want to get to your goals as efficiently as possible. Minimal abstractions, guidelines, tooling, indirection, magic, surprises and general overhead are in order. We don’t want to struggle with qu…

There's another comment that talks about medium to large project, and it's the same thing, it's a different use case. I don't care about medium or large projects, I need to add a quick semi-dynamic element to an incredible basic web app.

In my case, setting up a React or Angular project is going to be more work than just writing the whole thing in vanilla JavaScript. This has the added benefit that I actually understand what's going on.

The modern JavaScript frameworks are great for large projects, but it feels like learning Django in order to make an API that goes "pong" when you do a get request. I get why this happens. Vue looked great 8 years ago, small, simple and easy to get started with. Then it grew to support more and more use cases, and larger projects and now we need a new tiny framework. Or we can accept that JavaScript has come a long way and that many of us might not need a framework.

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

#83

Post by christophilus »

rwalle wrote: post #78

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 mini…

I’ve been doing it professionally for 20 years, and I agree. Modern front end development with TypeScript, Vite, Preact, and even the much maligned npm are so much better than anything that preceded them for building complex front end applications.

I like having a build step for code that I write. I build C, I build Go, I build C#. I don’t ship debug builds of those things.

I don’t know why I’d want to forego all of the niceties that a modern TS build brings and also ship what is essentially a debug build of JS to the browser.

Sure, for a really simple web page, I’ll just slap a script together. But for anything real, hell yes, give me a good build mechanism.

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

#84

Post by inbx0 »

rwalle wrote: post #78

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 mini…

The author is pretty clear that their intention is to use this as a simple first step to creating an app without the hassles of bundlers, they don't seem to be advocating that one would create "medium-large" projects like this. The word "incremental" is mentioned in the first sentence.

Nor does their message come across as "why don't people do this" to me.

> Until recently though, I wasn’t sure how to make this step feel incremental.

Seems like they genuinely just found a neat way to do a thing and wanted to share it.

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

#85

Post by oefrha »

dgb23 wrote: post #60
LordHeini wrote: post #31

To go quite a bit off topic. The author says that he starts with a single html file and splits it or incrementally adds stuff when needed. That course of action has proven to be a really bad idea on every non trivial web project I worked on. Mostly for teamwork and maintainability reasons. E.g there is no clear project structure, the next dev will not understand stuff and do things differently. And welcome to the cha…

You are optimizing for entirely different use cases. There are a whole bunch of devs who work alone or in (very) small teams. For this type of work it’s really more of a hindrance to have an imposed structure and tooling. We want to get to your goals as efficiently as possible. Minimal abstractions, guidelines, tooling, indirection, magic, surprises and general overhead are in order. We don’t want to struggle with qu…

No, proper structure and tooling (especially for HMR) are important productivity boosters for solo developers as well. Single file scales to about 1k LoC, it’s only viable for toys and tiny projects; beyond 2k-3k LoC you’ll hate yourself every time you need to change something (been there). And ad hoc shell script in place of npm/yarn/whatever proper package manager, which is way easier than said script? I hope that’s show business and not actually used.

Btw, this direct module import approach means you’ll be shipping a lot of unused code to users.

Edit: If you only need a tiny amount of progressive enhancement on top of static HTML: forget about this import map and ad hoc npm script business, use petite-vue (single script, 6KB, add a script tag like good old jQuery).

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

#86

Post by ducharmdev »

rwalle wrote: post #78

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 mini…

The last couple days there's been a lot of negativity towards the build step, but it's like everyone's forgotten the historical context that made the build step so popular to begin with.

I'll give credit to the post about the fragility of certain build tools long-term in the npm ecosystem, but I don't think that's a reason to shrug off build tools period. We just need better, more stable ones (and I think we're starting to finally get there).

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

#87

Post by flippinburgers »

christophilus wrote: post #83
rwalle wrote: post #78

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 mini…

I’ve been doing it professionally for 20 years, and I agree. Modern front end development with TypeScript, Vite, Preact, and even the much maligned npm are so much better than anything that preceded them for building complex front end applications. I like having a build step for code that I write. I build C, I build Go, I build C#. I don’t ship debug builds of those things. I don’t know why I’d want to forego all of…

Comparing building a golang project with "building" a frontend project is pretty laughable. Frontend "builds" are atrocious.

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

#88

Post by flippinburgers »

rwalle wrote: post #78

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 mini…

Man I cannot wait for bundlers and all of that garbage to go the way of the dodo bird.

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

#89

Post by selfmodruntime »

rwalle wrote: post #78

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 mini…

But can't you see? Overengineered blog / todo list clearly shows that JavaScript frameworks are totally useless and we should all be using jQuery instead. My own custom framework is totally up to the task and we shouldn't be trusting as the maintainer of common frameworks. The browser is a bad tool anyway and we should all go back to using text only web pages.
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