Isomorphic Web Applications

Chapter 5. Tools: webpack and Babel

This chapter covers

• Using webpack to load Node.js packages via npm in order to use them in browser code
• Compiling code with Babel using webpack loaders
• Loading CSS with webpack loaders
• Using webpack plugins to prepare your code for production
• Creating multiple configurations to manage builds for multiple environments

The JavaScript ecosystem provides many great libraries and tools to make writing applications faster and easier for developers. To take advantage of them, you need to have tooling in place that can compile, transform, and prepare your code for production. Enter webpack, a build tool that’s entirely configuration driven.

I’m going to be completely honest with you: webpack isn’t an intuitive ...