Imagine a world without open source software. Pretty scary, isn't it?

There would be no free operating systems that let you take full control of your computer.

For the past few years, Webpack has played a central and important role at trivago. We use it for handling SVG icons and to improve our startup time for the benefit of our users by loading resources on demand. We run a highly complicated build with plenty of custom plugins which perform all sorts of optimisations for us that no other tool would allow us to do. And because we truly love open source we’ve also open sourced our solution to speed up multi-compiler builds, which we rely on heavily to deliver ideal bundles to our users.

Because our main application was getting ever more memory-hungry, our awesome JavaScript architecture team developed a modern, freakishly efficient component and rendering framework which we will open source and highlight in a series of future articles. In order to prove the framework's maturity, we wanted to roll it out to the trivago core application.

We've prioritized the resources that our users need to load and gained an impressive boost on our JavaScript application startup. In this article, I will explain how we've used Webpack, adjusted our handling of SVG icons and prioritized user needs to achieve up to 4.5 times faster startup.

When people hear about dropping support for a certain Internet Explorer version, they mostly think of all the CSS hacks and workarounds that could be removed as a consequence. However, dropping support for IE8 can have subtle, but profound effects on your JavaScript. Read on to learn what we experienced when discontinuing support for IE8.

When publishing a JavaScript library, we usually want to make it available to as many people as possible to maximize the library's usefulness and adoption. In that respect, it can be helpful to users to have the library available in their preferred module format - CommonJS, AMD, ES6, etc. This article shows how to use webpack to automatically export multiple formats without having to maintain them separately.

When using webpack to build your assets, it's only a matter of time until you wish for targeted builds. Whether it's the output of the library you're working on (CJS, UMD, AMD, Var, etc.), or the specific feature set (IE8 support, no IE8 support). parallel-webpack can run those builds in parallel, thus making full use of the multi-core processing capabilities of modern devices.

Learn how we introduced webpack to build our JavaScript assets. One of the main challenges was to run both Assetic and webpack in parallel for some time, in order to run tests and to make sure nothing was broken. This was achieved without any code or configuration duplication by developing a custom webpack loader which was tailored to our setup, and which makes use of transducers.