This doesn’t have much impact on resulting JS size, but it will
hopefully make merge conflicts much less frequent.
The CSS growth is a little higher (6.5% increase in size) but is not
material.
If this materially reduces the number of merge conflicts we have, by
letting the git merge tools resolve some dist file mergers, I think it
would be worth it.
Some example changes in file size:
bundle.js 290K -> 301K
vendor.js 1,325K -> 1,321K
bundle.css 628K -> 669K
Multiple entry points can't result in a single bundle.css with a fixed filename, see
https://github.com/webpack/extract-text-webpack-plugin/issues/179
Until that's resolved, it's easier to keep the 'css' task separate in Webpack,
and have a single entry point for all CSS (bundle.scss).
Also partially reverting "Moved frontend assets into admin/ "module"",
which moved too many files: debug.css and install.css need to remain
as framework (not admin) deps. Split out into a separate `framework-css` Webpack
task in preparation for splitting off the module.
We've removed the ability to directly reference JS and CSS files
for form fields and other SilverStripe features in favour of a common bundle built by Webpack.
The logical next step is to make the framework module free of frontend dependencies,
which should simplify its operation, and avoid another time intensive "npm install" on a module.
The bundle is generated by running “webpack” directly - gulp is no
longer needed as an intermediary. The resulting config is a lot shorter,
although more configuration is pushed into lib.js.
Modules are shared between javascript files as global variables.
Although this global state pollution is a bit messy, I don’t think it’s
practically any worse than the previous state, and it highlights the
heavy coupling between the different packages we have in place.
Reducing the width of the coupling between the core javascript and
add-on modules would probably be a better way of dealing with this than
replacing global variables with some other kind of global state.
The web pack execution seems roughly twice as fast - if I clear out my
framework/client/dist/js folder, it takes 13.3s to rebuild. However,
it’s not rebuilding other files inside dist, only the bundle files.
CSS files are now included from javascript and incorporated into
bundle.css by the webpack. Although the style-loader is helpful in some
dev workflows (it allows live reload), it introduces a flash of
unstyled content which makes it inappropriate for production.
Instead ExtractTextPlugin is used to write all the aggregated CSS
into a single bundle.css file. A style-loader-based configuration could
be introduced for dev environments, if we make use of the webpack live
reloader in the future.
Note that the following features have been removed as they don't appear to be
necessary when using Webpack:
- UMD module generation
- thirdparty dist file copying
LeftAndMain.js deps: Without it, ssui.core.js gets loaded too late,
which leads e.g. to buttons being initialised without this added behaviour.
