Hello, fellow developers! Today, I'm going to dive into a topic that's been buzzing around the React community for a while now: Webpack Code Splitting. This powerful feature is a game-changer for optimizing your React applications, and I'm excited to share my insights with you.
What is Code Splitting?
Bundlers like Webpack and Browserify (through factor-bundle) offer code splitting, which allows them to produce numerous bundles that may be dynamically loaded during runtime. Code splitting can help you "lazy-load" just the things that are currently needed by the user, which can dramatically improve the performance of your app. While you haven’t reduced the overall amount of code in your app, you’ve avoided loading code that the user may never need and reduced the amount of code needed during the initial load.
Why Do We Need Code Splitting?
When building large-scale applications, the JavaScript bundle can become quite large, which can impact the load time of the application. Code splitting is a technique where we split our code into various bundles which can then be loaded on demand or in parallel. This can significantly reduce the load time of our application and has other benefits too. Create react app does it automatically. Dynamic import syntax is supported.
One of the main benefits of code splitting is that it allows us to split our code into various bundles which can then be loaded on demand or in parallel. This can significantly reduce the load time of our application, and it also allows us to split our code into smaller, more manageable chunks.
Code Splitting in React
React, as we know, is all about building a fast, smooth user experience. And the React team has provided us with a few handy tools to make code splitting a breeze. The two main concepts we'll be dealing with are React.lazy and Suspense.
React.lazy is a function that lets you render a dynamic import as a regular react component. It makes it possible to load components lazily, which can be very useful for reducing the size of the initial JavaScript bundle that the user's browser has to download and parse. Implement a single suspense component and have fallback component. Dynamically import is also there. You can setup error boundary too.
Suspense, on the other hand, allows us to wrap multiple lazy components and display some fallback content (like a loading indicator) while we’re waiting for the lazy component to load.
Code Splitting with Webpack
Webpack, a popular module bundler, has built-in support for code splitting. It allows you to split your code into various bundles which can then be loaded on demand or in parallel. This can significantly reduce the load time of your application and has other benefits too.
Webpack uses the concept of an "entry point" to understand where to start building the dependency graph of your application. By specifying multiple entry points, you can create multiple bundles, each of which can be loaded independently.
Route-Based Code Splitting
In most web applications, users only see a fraction of the entire app at any given moment. So, it makes sense to only load the code needed for the current view. This is where route-based code splitting comes into play.
With the help of libraries like react-router-dom, we can split our code based on routes. This means that code for a particular route will only be loaded when the user navigates to that route.