to me webpack seems to be like requirejs where you have to read a ton of documentation to get going... in contrast you have browserify with transforms thats completely "pluggable" and more succinct
Sure, but webpack solves a lot more problems then browserify, eg. bundle CSS per module, split points or the react hot loader. Also requireJs wasn't that hard to get into.
Not sure i follow bundle CSS per module? split points? can you elaborate and react hot loader seems to be coupled with needing to use react...
Is the css part this: ?? http://webpack.github.io/docs/stylesheets.html
because you can already do that with browserify so im not sure what Im missing
Can you point to browserify plugins/transformers/guides on how to handle CSS bundles, handling static assets and split points in code? I'm asking because I was searching for those and didn't find. Then switched to Webpack as it provides all of those.
Unfortunately `partition-bundle` can only partition by enrty points specified via configuration. Webpack can also do that and more importantly it can do splitting by split points in code: `require.ensire('./page', function(page) { ... })`.
Regarding `cssify`: does it able to extract styles into a separate CSS chunk so I can just include it <head />? Also what if it finds a reference to a font or an image in stylesheet? Webpack can handle all of that (embedding css in js bundle, splitting css into separating chunk, embedding font/images as base64 data URIs or treating them as separate assets and copying into output) and in configurable manner.
I like browserify for its super easy and thoughtful API but in terms of features I really need and use I prefer Webpack.
Yes thats the CSS part, didn't know that there is a similar feature in browserify.
Split points means, that you can have can split your application into different parts that will be loaded when needed, instead of compiling the whole app into one file.
React hot load is indeed bundled to reactJS, its a cool feature where you can run your app, change a react module and only this module will replaced in your running in the browser while the state and all other modules sty the same.
You can also do that with browserify you can split up your files such as vendor-bundle and app (for all of the user js) or you can go further and split per page, module, etc and server it up via xhr, server, etc
So i guess i still dont see how webpack is worth all of that ;)
Ok, maybe its just me knowing browserify not well enough, but maybe its that there are not enough articles that promote advanced features. Even the docs don't tell about this. The only bit I can find is in one of the last sentences of the handbook (and only cause you mentioned that this feature exists). So we are back to your initial point about the reading tons of docs ;)
Btw. for me the feature of having multiple entry points is essential for a package manager on client side.
Unfortunately `partition-bundle` can only partition by enrty points specified via configuration. Webpack can also do that and more importantly it can do splitting by split points in code: `require.ensire('./page', function(page) { ... })`. Regarding `cssify`: does it able to extract styles into a separate CSS chunk so I can just include it <head />? Also what if it finds a reference to a font or an image in stylesheet? Webpack can handle all of that (embedding css in js bundle, splitting css into separating chunk, embedding font/images as base64 data URIs or treating them as separate assets and copying into output) and in configurable manner. I like browserify for its super easy and thoughtful API but in terms of features I really need and use I prefer Webpack.