Webpack and Sitevision

What and why?

In our continuous efforts to increase the performance of websites, we are now taking the next step. From now on, all bundled modules in Sitevision will be built using Webpack.

We have migrated all bundled modules to use Webpack for building JavaScript and CSS, we are also dynamically loading some of the larger libraries. We do this to skip loading of heavy resources that are not needed on the current page. This is to decrease page weight and increase responsiveness of all pages created in Sitevision. Webpack also makes it easier for us to keep third party libraries up-to-date, ensuring functionality, security and performance over time.

Implications

Some libraries, JavaScript and CSS, that was always loaded in previous versions of Sitevision, may now not always be loaded. And may or may not be loaded depending on what type of modules that exist on the current page. Developers need to check their dependencies, and if needed make sure that the required dependencies are bundled and loaded when creating custom functionality.

In Short

jQuery and the utility svDocReady are unaffected by these changes and should work as in previous version of Sitevision.

Some bundled modules with heavy dependencies will load its dependencies at a later stage in Sitevision 8, so make sure to test custom functionality using bundled libraries with Sitevision 8.