The official Webpack team blog announces releases, funding, and technical notes on the JavaScript bundler, including versions 2, 3, and 4.
HN links it for release announcements and for its explanation of why HTTP/2 does not fully replace bundling; one commenter questions the length of the v4 beta.
I wish we had more historical overviews like this.
The number of new developers has been outstripping the number of old developers in most environments and this has been happening for at least the last 15 years.
Thus, we come back to Richard P. Gabriel's Worse is Better, or at least the essay's focus on the importance of social components of a project[1]. N.B.: not implying Redux is worse than any of the other discussed projects.
Newer generations cannot possibly have the time to go through the history and tradeoffs of various frameworks that used to be extremely popular and the reasons people moved on. Too many previous frameworks and too few posts like what you just wrote. Besides, where to start? It's not like TAOCP is going to have a chronology of Browser UI frameworks.
Instead, the tendency is to leverage the rapidly developing ecosystem and work with the projects that have the largest numbers of stars on github, etc.
If you are a very large well heeled eng. organization with a capability to enforce the use of particular frameworks, it is in your interest to popularize them. You will pay and encourage your engineering org to, among other things they do, market it to the dev. community. If there are enough engineers in your org (say: tens of thousands), you will begin exerting a tremendous concentrated influence on the Open Source community.
At the same time, for everyone else who does notwork inside a 10K+ engineer org, the lack of future maintenance and upgrades…
No, HTTP2 doesn't just replace bundling, and definitely not what Webpack does.
Based on what I've read, sending a few bundled chunks instead of many individual module files will still generally have less overhead. In addition, Webpack's ability to load and transform other file formats like images and styles is something that simply requesting ES modules over HTTP2 can't deal with. Webpack's ability to code-split an application is also important.
Tobias Koppers, the main Webpack developer, wrote an article last year on how Webpack and HTTP2 relate: https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-http-2-7083ec3f3ce6 .
It's also worth noting that Tobias had only been able to work on Webpack intermittently for the last couple years, until this recent funding allowed him to work on it full-time. Tobias has been writing reports on what he's been doing [0]. Also, grants and full-time development is enabling the team to work on projects like integrating WebAssembly support directly into Webpack [1].
[0] https://medium.com/webpack/the-chunk-graph-algorithm-week-26-29-7c88aa5e4b4e
[1] https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-freelancing-log-book-week-17-48233121afbe
Correct me if I'm misunderstanding the beta process in the javascript ecosystem, but Webpack v4 went into beta on Jan 25 [1] and removed the beta label on Feb 25 [2]. That's not "a while". While I don't want to detract from the work of maintainers—webpack is a great tool that's central to the workflow of thousands—the lack of documentation coupled with an extremely brief beta period gives most of us the impression of a haphazard, half-baked release that we just aren't going to trust for at least several more point releases.
[1] https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-4-beta-try-it-today-6b1d27d7d7e2
[2] https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-4-released-today-6cdb994702d4
Sorry for the late reply. Multiplexing is not a panacea, there's still some overhead, and even if there wasn't there's still a point where you start to lose lot of performance by limiting gzip compression (the smaller the file the less efficient the compression is).
You can read more about why we'll always need a bundling step at the following links:
http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/js-packaging-http2.htm
https://medium.com/@asyncmax/the-right-way-to-bundle-your-assets-for-faster-sites-over-http-2-437c37efe3ff#.sjb5wen8t
https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-http-2-7083ec3f3ce6#.74q6ro5kl
Sorry to be a party pooper again, but https://esdiscuss.org/topic/es8-proposal-optional-static-typing and https://ecmascript-daily.github.io/pages/status-of-static-typing-in-ecmascript/ ...
I'd like to see that myself, but what can you do... I'm learning Rust instead to use this in wasm. With new webpack initiative https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-awarded-125-000-from-moss-program-f63eeaaf4e15 it's looking good.
Hi @mbrumlow. Sean here from the webpack team.
We did a lot of study and testing on HTTP/2 and we found that your claims are entirely incorrect. But don't take my word for it, see the stats!
https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-http-2-7083ec3f3ce6
HOWEVER! HTTP/2 and webpack become even more powerful when used together! This is something we are really excited to share and build on!