Modern Front-End Development for Rails

Chapter 7webpack

In the beginning, JavaScript was simpler. HTML elements in your markup had attributes with names like onclick, and if you wanted something dynamic to happen, you’d write like one line of code in the onclick attribute. Although this was simple, it was extremely limited. Eventually coders wanted more complex effects in the browser and started placing JavaScript code in files external to the HTML and sending them to the browser via the script tag.

This was still sort of simple but also still sort of limited. As time moved on, JavaScript programs got more and more complicated, and the need to include multiple JavaScript files grew. The dependencies on third-party libraries grew. We added CSS, SASS, CoffeeScript, templates, and on ...