bundle / build less development

[thescientist13]

Type of Change

• New Feature Request
• Documentation / Website
• Improvement / Suggestion
• Bug
• Other (please clarify below)

Summary

As part of explorations into #305, continued into #354, and inspired by projects like Vite, es-dev-server, and Snowpack, it would be of interest to investigate a way to move away from bundling by default for development. webpack could still be used for production builds maybe, or maybe even something that is more ESM friendly, like Rollup.

Note I tried Snowpack, but it has a hard dependency on bootstrapping from a package.json, as opposed to being just more of an opinionated dev server like Vite.

Details

This would definitely require a lot of new work, but in a ESM first world, there are so many advantages in that the entire site wouldn't need to be prebuilt / bundled, and transformations could just happen on the fly + on demand. Plus all syntax could just be standardized to use import for everything.

Not opposed to coming up something of our own, maybe as its own package? Also, simplifying this and using something like Rollup may allow us to not have to rely on having to webpack-ify everything, and also free up a ton a devDependencies in the @greenwood/cli package.

Would allow us to explore usage of import-maps as a possible solution (bare imports and routing in general), ex.

<script>
{
  "imports": {
    "lit-element": "./vendor/lit-element/lit-element.js",
    "lit-html": "./vendor/lit-html/lit-html.js",
    "lit-html/lit-html.js": "./vendor/lit-html/lit-html.js",
    "lit-html/lib/shady-render.js": "./vendor/lit-html/lib/shady-render.js",
    "lit-html/directives/unsafe-html.js": "./vendor/lit-html/directives/unsafe-html.js"
  }
}
</script>

Some more specific webpacky things that we use webpack for that would have to be redone:

• dev server w/ live reload and file watching
• NormalModuleReplacementPlugin for mapping imports to user directories
• templating index.html
• bundling (just use Rollup?)

[thescientist13]

Could even push it farther with web packaging for production

[thescientist13]

Started working on this, seeing this as a critical path forward on the project taking into consideration all the rest of the items in the Architectural Digest Project. Will demo some of my thoughts at our next weekly team meeting.