Get up an running fast with ParcelJS

The terms like Webpack, Browserify, Grunt, Gulp are well known in developer communities for makings the lives easier for developers with task automation or resource bundling. It indeed makes the lives easier saving a lot of time required to perform repetitive tasks.

There is quite a number of discussions on the internet introducing tools like Gulp or comparing these tools discussing which is better.

Cons of using these tools

I personally don't want the process I have to go through configuring these development environments for mini projects/prototypes, and I tend to use some preconfigured template to get things up and running. Otherwise just feels like an overkill which you cannot avoid.

And one other issue with these tools is that when the project keeps growing, the tasks take a considerable amount of time to finish even though you optimize them as much as you can. And I always wished for a better machine, expecting that it would build my resources quicker.

Enter ParcelJS

Get up and running quickly with ParcelJS

Blazing fast, zero configuration web application bundler - That's how they describe them. With the relative new player ParcelJS the hazzle of configurations is not there. It's so easy to get started with. Once you have ParcelJS installed it's just a matter of typing parcel index.html and you are on the go with your new project/prototype.

Caution! If you have no external resources in your index.html Parcel doesn't host your page with a hot reloading server. At least one external resource should be there.

The community around ParcelJS is still evolving. However the trend is rocketing. Hopefully the tooling and support will also develop around ParcelJS to support the leading frameworks out there.

Check out ParcelJS on https://github.com/parcel-bundler/parcel