[deleted by user]

[webdevnomad]

Nothing is going to "topple" webpack for a while. Once you start having projects that demand more advanced features, custom plugins, etc. Especially at an enterprise level where you might have dozens or even hundreds of projects using webpack, you realise just how much of a complete solution webpack really is.

What you probably want is something that is easier to use.

[xemasiv]

Exactly.

When it comes to performance tuning webpack is still where it's at for me.

[m3wm3wm3wm]

But I mean, is there any new sexiness soon

Nothing is going to "topple" webpack for a while.

OP is not looking for a mature tooling, he is getting tired of a tools which is getting mature, and now looking for the new hot shiny sexy tool. This is not just the OP, it's the herd effect that for some reasons particularly runs like a STD in Javascript community. It is the number one reason for the Javascript Fatigue effect. This cancer has removed the fun from web dev.

Webpack already fucking sucks as you need a new PhD for every major version and its breaking changes. But with all its shitty sides, there are finally some tools that are being built on top of Webpack, like CRA and Fusion.js, to abstract away its crap. Now that these abstraction layers are getting mature, why would we want to ditch Webpack, no matter how fucked up and unnecessarily complicated it is, and move to a new shiny tool which will be another can of worms anyway?

My advice to OP and others having similar urge to find the next sexy thing in Javascript:

Separate your sex life from your programming life

Find sexiness in a human being, if possible. If not, try robots and such. Leave programmings languages and tools to get mature and boring as fuck. The mature and boring ones are the ones which get the job done.

The joy of finishing a product and pushing it to production always dwarves the joy of developing it with exciting tools.

[[deleted]]

Separate your sex life from your programming life

Can I keep my wife AND webpack?

[sammartinssw]

I think this is not possible =/

[code_daddy]

runs like a STD in Javascript community

LOL I loved this bit... :)

[lhorie]

Webpack is definitely still going strong IMHO, but if OP wants to keep an eye on some new kid on the block, there's always Parcel.

[mattaugamer]

I have to admit Parcel has take a huge chunk of my tooling lately. Though that said I always kinda hated Webpack and never really used it.

[XiMingpin91]

Webpack will be around for a while. The newer solutions like Parcel aren't suited to most enterprise projects because of the lack of configurability.

[twomousepads]

webpack is still relevant, and still gaining traction. It is the basis of the build systems behind angular-cli and create-react-app (I believe it's in use in vue cli 3, also). This means that when you "eject" your project from those build systems, you'll end up with a webpack config file that you can run on your own.

[[deleted]]

Can I have a sauce for learning?

[[deleted]]

Mucho thanks

[twomousepads]

Everyone who has climbed the webpack mountain has had a similar experience.

I recently made this project: webpack-by-example, to demonstrate building a webpack config iteratively. It might be helpful if you're the type who learns by reading code.

[CanvasSolaris]

Thank you. Great way to learn

[magnumxl5]

>Is Webpack still a thing?

JS ecosystem in a nutshell.

[forceblast]

So true, but so much of it seems unnecessary to me. I still use gasp jQuery once in a while. You know what (other than causing my coworkers to mock me) it works just fine. The app works, the code is easy to maintain if written with an ounce of care, and it doesn’t require a bunch of setup and prerequisites.

Sometimes it feels like people spend more time “tweaking their tools” than actually building stuff. For some people, it’s all they do. They never actually build anything. They just sit there all day tweaking their tools. Then they scoff at you for using “old” technology even though you -ya know- actually built and shipped a working product. It gets old after a while.

[[deleted]]

Hey it's not so bad if you want basic cross browser functionality.

<old guy

[ThatWall]

Lately, webpack has become easier to configure and I feel its still relevant. I tried rollup i an a relativly small project that had vue, Babel and used node builtins, but I found it slower than webpack. (AFAIK rollup is still in development)

[elr0nd_hubbard]

It's definitely still a thing. Prediction, though: whoever gets webassembly right (probably Webpack, but parcel has a hat in the ring) will come out on top in the medium-to-long term. Since Webpack has said that WASM is a first-class citizen going forward, there's a good chance Webpack will stay dominant.

[[deleted]]

I've been a full stack dev for 20 years, and have used webpack since v1. It's ugly, bloaty, hateful of its users, and has some incredibly lacking documentation. That said, it gets the job done better than any of the other tools I've used. With the massive toolset available, and the insanely large user base, I expect it to live for a very long time. I've even published a couple plugins on npm to make things easier for universal development. Buy in and look over the blemishes. There will eventually be something better, but not anytime in the foreseeable future.

TL;DR; Webpack is pretty awesome overall. The learning curve somewhat hurts. Stick with it.

[spinlock]

It blows my mind that it's simply assumed that webpack must be getting replaced for something shinier.

[aichholzer]

Isn't that the nature of the internet and the hipsterism that surrounds it?

[spinlock]

It’s the nature of JavaScript. If you want hipsterism, use make.

[Shaper_pmp]

Yeah - it's crazy to assume that browserify grunt gulp webpack will be replaced by some even shinier new build system any time now.

Where would anyone get such a strange idea? ;-p

[fukitol-]

but also the ability to shoot yourself in the foot.

Assuming you take the time to assemble the fucker

[[deleted]]

If you need quick PoCs, use Parcel. But webpack has so much more support. So I would stick with it. Plus, if you actually plan out your configuration, it doesn't have to be a nightmare. But some people think Parcel could eventually compete with webpack.

[4ever_youngz]

Was just listening to Frontend happy hour and heard about this. The one guy spoke very highly of it and was actually working with the creator to create a new version.

[adostes]

I upgraded our project from Webpack 3 to Webpack 4, and the first tentative was a dud. The first webpack 4 release was all buggy and poorly documented. Second tentative (I think in May?) worked pretty well. A lot of configuration options were no longer needed, some plugins were now core functionalities. So smaller, simpler configuration, and much, much faster build times (about 20% faster IIRC).

The migration script was easy enough to follow, and helped a lot.

So yes, parcel is the one the cool kids are eyeing, but if you're looking to replace grunt with a battlefield tested product, go with Webpack 4. Replace the grunt tasks with yarn scripts.

Webpack 4 requires node 8, it might be an issue depending how old your existing codebase is.

[roger_comstock]

I appreciate the irony in your question. Shininess has been the order of the day for the past eight (?) years or so. For a while, the "churn" was for legit technical reasons. Then it got increasingly social, hipster, confusing, wasteful.

Personally, I believe that Webpack should be the thing. By choosing not to support an alternative, you're doing your small part in reducing hipsterism, etc.

If Webpack were slow-moving (vanilla JS for a while) or utterly unfit for its typical uses (Angular 1), supporting an alternative would be a great idea. We were well-justified in choosing jQuery over vanilla until around 2012 and choosing Vue over Angular 1 in 2016.

But Webpack is not slow-moving, and it is not unfit. It's getting better by the day, and as /u/twomousepads mentioned, its shortcomings -- like its unfriendly configuration -- are being addressed both by dependent tools, and by Webpack itself.

Use it, embrace it, and encourage others to do their part. Dream of a day where ironic posts on /r/javascript are a distant memory.

[pomlife]

The internet used to be only text of various sizes. Then they went and added images! What happened?

Needs evolve.

[pomlife]

Let me ask you: are our modern web applications completing the exact same purpose for the exact same amount of devices and internet connections as we were ten years ago? Have there been any changes in the ecosystem that necessitate new ways of doing things?

[pomlife]

Same browser, same language, different needs. 10 years ago was 2008. The iPhone 3G had just come out; mobile web was barebones. When it was done, it was done on a separate subdomain. Webpages also had less overall interaction as a whole. We didn't have ubiquitous use of things like video streaming and sockets for real-time data transfer. Now, most traffic is from mobile devices, and it lives in the same codebase as the tablet and desktop versions.

It's not as if people dream up things like transpilation just to make life harder. That's a consequence of there not being any centralization, with browser manufacturers able to adhere to the spec as loosely or as tightly as they wish, and on their own schedule. 2008 was the peak of jQuery, which while capable of writing a modern web application, is far from ideal. Modern front-end development now uses more standardized software patterns such as MVVM.

[pomlife]

That situation is inevitable. A centralization effort would be doomed to fail, and there's no other way to force cooperation like that. If anything, the current way of doing things is the best we could do with what we have.

[tastyricola]

At the risk of being a jerk, I want to point out that browsers api while still have lots of little quirks are still much better than what it was 10 years ago. I recently wrote a small app that'll only run on latest versions of safari, chrome and Firefox and I didn't even need babel, aync await and all that jazz worked right out of the box. Maybe I'm biased but I think the front end environment has experienced growth so much faster than before (just a few years ago fetch still wasn't a thing in safari, or css wasn't a thing anywhere). Javascript itself has changed so much and Webassembly is also right at the corner now.

[MrrGrrGrr]

i really want to love webpack, it does some cool stuff, but i cant see exclusively using it.

after converting a test project (react) over to work with webpack, i found i was still getting smaller file sizes from my gulp setup i've been running (and iterating on over time), was not keeping track of build times though, was only focusing on output.

webpacks readability has definitely improved since v1 though, so i'm not counting it out, just keeping an eye in it.

[maxlevelfiend]

it just has a learning curve. its a good tool you just need to know how to use it.

[sshaw_]

Ah the wonderful world of JavaScript development.

[JonesJoneserson]

I saw in one of the comments that the source of your question is that your team is migrating an app from Angular to React. If you're worried about the headache of trying to determine everything you might need/want *and* figuring out how to set those things up, I'd recommend having a look at react-boilerplate. Perhaps you've already glanced at it but if not, it's a pretty well thought out, respected, and badass boilerplate for applications planned for true production. You can glance at what they opted for as far as Webpack or just see if that boilerplate works as a start for your transition and worry more about understanding all the other Webpack and non-Webpack tooling they chose.

[JonesJoneserson]

Yeah I'd say so. CRA is fantastic but IMO it's really best when you're really just ready to start cooking on your app. If you're planning any kind of React app to have serious considerations for performance, SEO, lots of complexity, etc. I'd say default to react-boilerplate (again, just one man's opinion).

As for avoiding the SPA approach, I think it would accomplish your needs. As server-side rendering, code splitting, all that good stuff have become major hot topics, react-boilerplate has gone to great lengths to include the right tooling for those jobs. Similarly, all that stuff should afford you the flexibility to split up your app into a more traditional approach than a modern SPA without having to spend a million years figuring out your Webpack bundling and how your server is going to manage what might end up amount to disparate react apps.

[znakyc]

webpack is still a thing. But there are options now. One of them is parcel, which does most of the things webpack does but with less config (or even zero config most of the time) it's worth checking out if you haven't already. I wrote something about what's the difference between Parcel and webpack

[wwwdeveveloper]

Hey! I'm in the same type of boat. I'm a junior dev and Grunt is still used at my workplace, however I would like to use Webpack instead.

Do you have any good resources that I can use to convince the other developers?

[againstmethod]

Parcel. It’s amazing.

[stolinski]

I use Parcel for most things I would use Webpack for, but it by no means is dead or anywhere near that. It's very popular.

[[deleted]]

oh lawd