Django: Going build-free with native JavaScript modules

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A new Django blog post/announcement has been posted!

For the last decade and more, we've been bundling CSS and JavaScript files. These build tools allowed us to utilize new browser capabilities in CSS and JS while still supporting older browsers. They also helped with client-side network performance, minimizing the content to be as small as possible and combining files into one large bundle to reduce network handshakes. We've gone through a lot of build tools iterations in the process; from Grunt (2012) to Gulp (2013) to Webpack (2014) to Parcel (2017) to esbuild (2020) and Vite (2020).

And with modern browser technologies there is less need for these build tools.

• Modern CSS supports many of the features natively that the build tools were created for. CSS nesting to organize code, variables, @supports for feature detection.
• JavaScript ES6 / ES2015 was a big step forward, and the language has been progressing steadily ever since. It now has native module support with the import / export keywords
• Meanwhile, with HTTP/2 performance improvements, parallel requests can be made over the same connection, removing the constraints of the HTTP/1.x protocol.

These build processes are complex, particularly for beginners to Django. The tools and associated best practices move quickly. There is a lot to learn and you need to understand how to utilize them with ...

Get the full details here: Going build-free with native JavaScript modules | Weblog | Django