Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

Rollup

Browserify and Webpack focus on CommonJS modules, and require a Babel plugin to support ES6 modules. Rollup supports native ES6 modules out of the box.

Rollup also supports tree-shaking, a feature that eliminates unused code from the bundle. Let's say you are importing a large utility library supporting 100 functions, but are only using four of them; tree-shaking will remove the 96 that are not required for our app. This can significantly reduce bundle size for applications that have a lot of dependencies.

Traditionally, the community consensus is to use Webpack for applications, and Rollup for libraries. There are two reasons for this:

• Webpack generally produces more boilerplate and thus produces a noticeably larger bundle size that's ...