Building Web Apps with Bundlers
In the previous chapter, we covered an important set of auxiliary tooling – linters and formatters. While code quality is important, the undoubtedly most important aspect of every project is what is shipped and used by the customer. This is the area where a special kind of tooling – called bundlers – shines.
A bundler is a tool that understands and processes source code to produce files that can be placed on a web server and are ready to be consumed by web browsers. It takes HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and related files into consideration to make them more efficient and readable. In this process, a bundler would merge, split, minify, and even translate code from one standard such as ES2020 into another standard such as ES5.
Today, bundlers are no longer nice to have, but necessarily used for most projects directly or indirectly. Pretty much every web framework offers tooling that is built upon a bundler. Often, the challenge is...
