My web development is principally intranet sites and web front-ends for embedded devices using NodeJS.
My current structure is to have everything in one NPM package. I run NodeJS behind Nginx, and let Nginx serve css/image/client-side-javascript files directly from public.
I'm starting to use VueJS and Vuelidate, both of which use the now ES6 modules system - e.g. import { required, minLength } from 'vuelidate/lib/validators'.
While I've (rather hackily) made these work with my current structure, I think the time has come to get into the world of Javascript build-systems/bundlers.
If I use VueJS's preferred option of WebPack, how should I change the structure of my code?
Should I have one NPM package for the frontend (generated by vue-cli init) and another for the Express backend app?
Should I put my Express App into the generated Vue frontend package?
Should I use browserify to do the job of WebPack and stay with my existing structure?
Or something else entirely?
I’m not sure why you’re intent on putting your JavaScript code in other packages. If you have an application then you can keep your raw JavaScript files in there, along with the build script(s). Someone should be able to check your application out and be able to build it.
If you’re looking to get started with a build system, then a nice “bridge” might be to use Mix, a project created by Laravel for building front-end assets such as Sass and JavaScript. It uses Webpack under the hood, but in turn exposes a more user-friendly, fluid API.
If you go down this route, then you could put your raw JavaScript files in a lib/ or src/ directory. You could then use Mix to compile these components like this:
mix.js('lib/your-entry-point-script.js', 'public/js/app.js');
Your entry point script would just be the script that requires all your other scripts and components and the script that you want “built”. Mix would then compile that and place the resultant script at public/js/app.js.
Mix itself is just a npm package, so all you need to do is npm install laravel-mix --save-dev.
You can read more about Mix at https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/mix
Related
Im building a React Nodejs web application and Im trying to understand how to bundle the frontend with webpack. [
This is my project structure
Where should I install webpack and configure webpack.config.js? Most of the project structures I have seen put the frontend folder inside the backend folder, also in some projects they also bundle the backend separately. Can someone give me an explanation on where to implement it with this folder structure? I'm really confused
This article was kind of getting to the point but didnt solve my question
Webpack should be part of the frontend repository, so it should go into the frontend/package.json. Similarly, just like frontend/eslintrc.json is your linting settings for your frontend, you should create a frontend/webpack.config.js for your frontend webpack config.
Since you're in VSCode, it looks like, when dealing with just the frontend, you could consider making things easier on yourself by going to File -> Open Folder -> select the Frontend folder, and then you can easily operate on it, its package, and everything it contains (without getting mixed up with the backend at all).
Where your frontend folder goes is up to you, but your current approach is fine - organizing to have a /frontend and a separate /backend folder in the same parent directory if you wish.
I'm a back-end java developer (spring boot) and currently I'm interested in building a single page application.
What I like about SPA frameworks (mostly Vue):
Model-binding (saves boilerplate code)
Components and templates (separating code in multiple files is always good, but I don't like single file components as I feel they mix the view and logic)
Routers
However, unless you are using Node there seems to be poor integration
What I don't like:
Node (I develop backend in Java so I don't want to install node just as a prerequisite for NPM)
NPM (I already have dependency management in Maven/Gradle. I actually don't mind it as much, I just don't want to install it and manage it seperately)
I understand why stuff like Node, Npm, Webpack is necessary, it's just that I've already have Java/Spring/Eclipse doing all that for me. I have no desire to have basically two separate build processes.
TLDR: I like the direction and architecture of modern frontend, I just don't want to deal with the tools that are used.
Specific Question: How can I develop a modern SPA using Spring Boot, Gradle/Maven and Vue.js and not have to install Node/Npm/Vue cli etc. What are the best tools if there are any?
Thank you.
You can use maven frontend plugin hosted from here.
It is maven plugin that is leveraging downloading nodejs, webpack, gulp, grunt and running it on your codebase.
You will be able to run maven build and nodejs will be downloaded automatically. It will run your frontend build as well and in resulting jar you will have only necessary minified files.
However, you have to be aware that if you want to debug your frontend application it is a good idea to have those things installed and being able to run the app locally without minification of html and js files.
If you don`t want to download tools you can use helper scripts provided by authors of this plugin to use tools downloaded by this plugin.
I wrote an editor in HTML/JS that I want to use for multiple Electron based applications and a website.
For testing purposes I have package all dependencies, some are npm modules, some are font files, some are images, into a single file using browserify. For development I find this quite attractive as npm take care of keeping the packages up-to-date and browserify build even things like images and CSS into a single JS file. And included this bundle using a script tag in a html file.
Now I would love to get this onto npm to use as a dependency for other projects. But frankly I am at a loos as to how to do this.
Some blogs suggest to use:
module.exports = mymodule
But I want people and myself to be able to either get a single file and insert it using a script tag to get a global function to start my editor as well as require it using npm for Electron based apps.
startEditor = require('mymodule')
<script src="path/to/mymodule"></script>
Should both be valid ways to use the editor.
You can see the current state of the project on GitHub
I've got two projects which I've created:
A web UI built using webpack
A Vert.x webserver written in java built using Gradle
I want to find a way to bring the resulting build dir contents of the first project into the second as the webroot which will be server up using the StaticHandler.
Is anyone aware of a clean way to do this? I want to preserve the two git projects as they are because I like using the webpack dev server for development of the UI and it generally feels cleaner to have them separated.
I was looking at potentially using the bitbucket pipelines build on my repo, however bringing the assets generated by the first project into the build of the second is where I'm facing issues.
You could create a gradle task that before that depends on the jar task (so it runs before it) executes webpack compile into the resources directory. So when your jar task runs it bundles the compiled webpack code.
I am in the process of converting an existing Rails 3.1 app I made for a client into a Backbone.js app with the Rails app only as a backend server extension. This is only a personal project of mine, to learn more about Backbone.js.
While setting up Backbone.js (using Backbone-on-Rails), I noticed I have some dependencies (like backbone-forms) that come from external sources and are frequently updated.
I've grown accustomed to using Bundler to manage my Ruby gems, but I haven't found anything similar for JavaScript files. I'm wondering if there is any way to do the same for Javascript (and possibly css) files.
Basically I can see three possibilities to solve this issue:
Simply write down all the sources for each JS file and check these sources from time to time to see what has changed.
Use some kind of existing "Bundler for Javascript" type of tool, I've been looking for something like this but have yet to find anything (good).
Since most of these JS files will be coming from Git anyway, use Git to get the files directly and use checkout to get the latest version from time to time.
I prefer the last option, but was hoping on some more input from other people who have gone this route or preferred some other way to tackle this issue (or is this even an issue?).
I figure the Git way seems easy, but I am not quite sure yet how I could make this work nicely with Rails 3.1 and Sprockets. I guess I'd try to checkout a single file using Git and have it be cloned in a directory that is accessible to Sprockets, but I haven't tried this yet.
Any thoughts?
You don't mention it in your alternatives, but ideally you should use something like Maven to manage your dependencies. Unfortunately, there are no public repositories for javascript files. This discussion lists some other options which might be of help to you: JQuery Availability on Maven Repositories
For now I've settled on using the Git solution combined with some guard-shell magic.
The steps I follow:
Create a dependencies directory somewhere on your local drive
Clone the repositories with javascript (or css) files you want to use in the app
Set up a custom guard-shell command to do the following:
group 'dependencies' do
guard 'shell' do
dependencies = '~/path/to/dependencies/'
watch(%r{backbone-forms/src/(backbone\-forms\.js)}) {|m| `cp #{dependencies + m[0]} vendor/assets/javascripts/#{m[1]}` }
end
end
Place the Guardfile at the root of the app directory
It takes some time to set things up, but after that, when you have the Guard running, and you pull changes into your dependencies, the required files are automatically copied to your application directory, which are then part of your repository.
It seems to work great, you need to do some work for each new file you want to include in the asset pipeline, but all that is required is cloning the repository in your dependencies directory and adding a single line to your Guardfile, for example for the backbone-form css:
watch(%r{backbone-forms/src/(backbone\-forms\.css)}) {|m| `cp #{dependencies + m[0]} vendor/assets/stylesheets/#{m[1]}` }
Also, the reason I added this Guard to a group is because I keep my dependencies outside the main application directory, which means guard normally doesn't check my dependencies directory. To make this work, I start up my main Guard processes using bundle exec guard -g main and use bundle exec guard -w ~/path/to/dependencies -g dependencies in a new terminal window/tab to specify the -w(atchdir).