Tag Archives: webpack

A Java programmer’s guide to delivering webapp frontends

When I started investigating (googling) web frontends, I found tutorials for various frameworks and I found tutorials using node.js to deliver frontends to web browsers on localhost.

What I did not find, was something telling me how I should pack up and deliver the webapp frontend from my production system, so that comes here:

  1. A web application frontendĀ  is a piece of javascript code, that builds its user interface by rebuilding the DOM tree of the webpage that loaded it
  2. The javascript needed for a webapp is packaged up as a big javascript file, typically named bundle.js,
  3. The initial HTML file references bundle.js
  4. The initial HTML file also contains an element that matches what the javascript code expects to be its start element (i.e. the point in the DOM of the parsed HTML file, where the javascript program starts rebuilding its own DOM)

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