Task Runners and Building our JavaScript Code

No excuses now, every should be transpiling and building their web application. I put together a slidedeck that went through the whys and the benefits. Take a look

I based my slidedeck on the presentation Peter Hunt gave back in 2014.

To summarize:

  • Spas are the best UX experience
  • Con is that the initial load takes too long
  • Instagram has 10 SPAs in their architecture
  • Reduce amount of HTTP requests & bytes downloaded
  • Bundling everything into one file is not the best approach 2.5MB gzip bundled file is too big.
  • Utilize a module system to intelligently bundle your packages with a dynamic dependency map.

The 2 slides from his presentation that impacted me the most: Bundled Modules Example Optimized Bundled Modules Example

###Overall, I argued the need to build web front end code so one could:

  • Developers to mimic production on their own box.
    • Developers are able to identify concatenation and minification issues before code is checked in.
    • The build config is shared amongst all environments Prepares us for AngularJs 2 and ES6
  • Automated versioning of shared packaged libraries.
    • Treat our shared libriaries like 3rd parties
    • On check-in, build, package and version shared libraries deploying to local package repository like git. This speeds up the build process for the Spa and also removes versioning within TFS.

    • Part of the build process can also incorporate the automation of generating documentation and demos. See how AngularStrap and UI-Boostrap and achieving this from their source code.
  • Utilize a package manager and a local rev. repository.
  • Automated builds of documentation and shared component demos.
  • Reduction and even elimination of Glofs and Glogs.

  • Reduce initial Spa loading time through intelligent bundling: use a module system and an intelligent dependency map bundling tool, like webpack.

  • Architecting our web application code so it is web server agnostic.
    • Instead of loading 100+ servers with our web application files, we can upload them to one location
    • Avoids the second hop to our F5 and web farm in our current architecture
    • Brings us closer to a true micro services SOA architecture; separating the front end from the middle tier.
    • Allows us to use redirection only for api calls. Don’t have to perform a browser redirect during login.
    • An example of a server agnostic web application: 2015-05-7-Build-JavaScript,objective-6.png
Written on May 7, 2015