Learn Babel, Grunt and Reactfire

Babel has support for the latest version of JavaScript through syntax transformers. These plugins allow you to use new syntax, right now without waiting for browser support.

babel

Converting all of our modern JavaScript into ES5 compatible syntax is a great way to use modern features while targeting older browsers. What happens when the browsers natively support these language features? Then it no longer makes sense to transform that code or to include polyfills that will go unused. In this lesson, we’ll add the `@babel/polyfill` package and configure `babel-preset-env`

Target specific browsers with babel-preset-env and the babel pollyfill

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

We take the opengraph image we wrote in codesandbox and copy it into our serverless function. We use Rollup to compile the component into an IIFE (immediately invoked function expression) that can run in our headless browser environment and cover a wide set of rollup plugins that we need for compatibility. We end the lesson having successfully screenshot our opengraph react component from our Netlify Function

Compiling a React to an IIFE with Rollup to execute and render in a headless browser

We can write our package using the latest JavaScript syntax with a compilation step. In this lesson we will install `babel-cli` and `babel-preset-latest` and wire up a `build` script to compile our code using the babel “latest” preset when source files change. This means those using our package can use it in any version of JavaScript even though we are using the latest syntax for our source code.

Set up compilation of source code using babel with npm scripts

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

Task automation is critical for any AngularJS single-page application. Grunt gets the job done.

Introduction to Grunt for Angular

Gulp is a toolkit for automating painful or time-consuming tasks in your development workflow, so you can stop messing around and build something.

gulp

What is already a nice workflow using Gulp, Browserify, Watchify & Browsersync to enable auto rebuilds & live browser reloading can be further improved by adding Babelify. A simple wrapper around the popular transpiler Babel, Babelify can ‘transform’ source files as they pass through our stream to enable certain Javascript features not yet available in the Browser or Node. We end the lesson by looking at how to generate & extract sourcemaps using `exorcist`.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Babel & Source Maps

grunt

GruntJS allows you to use underscore/erb style templates to reduce repetition and create variables. This is commonly used to point at build folders and files within your application's structure.

Template

In this lesson John will show you how to start using Grunt Uglify to compress your javascript for production deployment.

Uglify

Grunt Multitask allows you to write complex tasks that run multiple targets. In this lesson, John will show you how to use Multitask in your GruntJS builds.

Multitask

You can use Grunt to combine all of your Javascript files into a single concatenated file.

Concatenating Your Javascript with grunt-contrib-concat

For production we want to use minified javascript to reduce the payload that is sent from the server. This can easily be accomplished with grunt-uglify.

Minifying your output with grunt-uglify

In this lesson John will show you how to get started with grunt-contrib-watch. Watch is an essential component of any Grunt build, and you will find yourself using it in almost every project. 

Grunt Watch

Grunt will clean up your build with the grunt-contrib-clean to make sure that no artifacts from previous builds are hanging around.

Cleaning your build folder with grunt-contrib-clean

With Grunt you can automate core tasks for your AngularJS project. In this lesson we will take a look at converting Stylus files to CSS, and add a watch task to convert those files automatically whenever a change is detected.

Development Automation Tasks with Grunt

React becomes incredibly powerful when coupled with a real-time backend like Firebase. See how easy it is to bring the two together and chat with Star Wars characters while you're at it.

React and Firebase with ReactFire

Babel is a compiler that lets us right future JavaScript not yet fully in browsers (ES6 / ES2015, ES7 / ES2016, etc) and transpile it back into code that can be used now. We'll walk through installing babel, writing some future JS syntax, transpiling it, and running it in a browser.

**This lesson is out of date and uses an older version of Babel.**

Writing next generation JavaScript with Babel 5 (out of date)

Build and watch ECMAscript 6 using traceur compiler and Grunt.

traceur compiler and Grunt

In this lesson John will show you how to create a simple external config file for your GruntJS build.

External Config

In this lesson you will install GruntJS and get up and running with your first task, initial configuration, and how to get Grunt methods auto-completing in WebStorm.

Introduction to Grunt

Webpack loaders are how you tell webpack to resolve your dependencies and you can use a loader built for the babel transpiler to easily enable ES6 code in your project. Full sourcemap support is also available using webpack's devtool property.

Webpack Loaders, Source Maps, and ES6

In this lesson, we’ll install Babel and use it from the terminal to see how it can take JavaScript that uses modern language features and output JavaScript that will run in down-level browsers.

Transform Modern JavaScript Features with Babel

webpack is a tool to build JavaScript modules in your application. To start using webpack from its cli or api, follow the Installation instructions. webpack simplifies your workflow by quickly constructing a dependency graph of your application and bundling them in the right order. webpack can be configured to customise optimisations to your code, to split vendor/css/js code for production, run a development server that hot-reloads your code without page refresh and many such cool features.

webpack

In this lesson, we'll configure webpack to use the Babel loader for our JavaScript files, allowing us to transpile our source files and generate a bundle for deploying our application.

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