So, there you sit, conflicted. You've got a lovely build setup; it's a thing of beauty. Precious, polished like a diamond, sharpened like a circular saw. There at the core of your carefully crafted setup sits webpack. Heaving, mysterious... powerful.
A funny thing happened on the way to the registry the other day. Something changed in an npm package I was using and confusion arose. You can read my unfiltered confusion here but here's the slightly clearer explanation.
I'm quite proud of this: https://www.extrahop.com/company/blog/2017/extrahop-webpack-accelerating-build-times/
If you didn't know, I spend a good amount of my spare time hacking on open source software. You may not know what that is. I would describe OSS as software made with ❤ by people, for other people to use.
You are currently reading this on a platform that was built using OSS. It's all around you, every day. It's on your phone, on your computer, on your TV. It's everywhere.
It's my hobby, it's part of my work. This specifically was one of those tremendously rare occasions when I got paid directly to work on my hobby, with people much brighter than me. It was brilliant. I loved it; it was a privilege.
Here's to Open Source!
My name is John Reilly and I'm a VS Code addict. There I said it. I'm also a big fan of TypeScript and webpack. I've recently switched to using the awesome fork-ts-checker-webpack-plugin to speed up my builds.
One of the most exciting features to ship with TypeScript 2.4 was support for the dynamic import expression. To quote the release blog post:
Have you ever wondered what happens behind the scenes of open source projects? One that I'm involved with is ts-loader; a TypeScript loader for webpack. Yesterday was an interesting day in the life of ts-loader and webpack; things unexpectedly broke. Oh and don't worry, they're fixed now.
Sometimes you write a post for the ages. Sometimes you write one you hope is out of date before you hit "publish". This is one of those.
webpack 2 is on it's way. As one of the maintainers of ts-loader I've been checking out that ts-loader works with webpack 2. It does: phew!
Hands up, despite being one of the maintainers of ts-loader (a TypeScript loader for webpack) I have not been tracking webpack v2. My reasons? Well, I'm keen on cutting edge but bleeding edge is often not a ton of fun as dealing with regularly breaking changes is frustrating. I'm generally happy to wait for things to settle down a bit before leaping aboard. However, webpack 2 RC'd last week and so it's time to take a look!
Like Captain Ahab I resolve to sync the white whale that is webpack's enhanced-resolve... English you say? Let me start again:
I've been searching for a way to describe what the DefinePlugin actually does. The docs say:
Define free variables. Useful for having development builds with debug logging or adding global constants.
You may know that Angular ships with a cutdown version of jQuery called jQLite. It's still possible to use the full-fat jQuery; to quote the docs:
This technique actually applies to pretty much any web stack where you have to supply templates; it just so happens that I'm using Angular 1.x in this case. Also I have an extra technique which is useful to handle the ng-include scenario.
TypeScript first gained support for tsconfig.json back with the 1.5 release. However, to my lasting regret and surprise Visual Studio will not be gaining meaningful support for it until TypeScript 1.8 ships. However, if you want it now, it's already available to use in beta.
I wrote a while ago about how I was using some different tools in a current project: