Test-Driven React

Packaging an App with webpack

In the beginning, preparing JavaScript for the browser was simple: put your page’s functionality in a single script and loaded it with a <script> tag. Then jQuery took off, and your script had a dependency. No problem: jQuery + app = two <script> tags. But then other libraries came around, which depended in turn on other libraries. Using Backbone.js? Better load it after Underscore.js. As more app functionality moved into the browser, the once simple act of loading code in the right order became a challenge. And what about concatenating and minifying scripts for performance? What about loading “below-the-fold” scripts asynchronously? What about development mode?

Only a few years ago, bespoke in-house tools were ...