As web applications grow increasingly complex, making your web app scalable becomes of the utmost importance. Whereas in the past writing ad-hoc JavaScript and jQuery would suffice, nowadays building a web app requires a much greater degree of discipline and formal software development practices, such as:
- Unit tests to ensure modifications to your code don’t break existing functionality
- Linting to ensure consistent coding style free of errors
- Production builds that differ from development builds
The web also provides some of its own unique development challenges. For example, since webpages make a lot of asynchronous requests, your web app’s performance can be significantly degraded from having to request hundreds of JS and CSS files, each with their own tiny overhead (headers, handshakes, and so on). This particular issue can often be addressed by bundling the files together, so you’re only requesting a single bundled JS and CSS file rather than hundreds of individual ones.
Which bundling tool should you use: Webpack or Browserify + Gulp? Here is the guide to choosing.
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