Browser build for client

[curran]

I'm experimenting with using dependencies from a CDN, and it would be interesting to expose sharedb/lib/client in a browser build with a browser global. That way it would be possible to load the ShareDB client from a CDN, rather than include it in the project bundle.

Would this be of interest to anyone else?

[curran]

FWIW it comes to about 86KB minified, using a Rollup build with Node polyfills

In the ShareDB examples with Browserify, it comes to about 98KB minified.

cd examples/counter/static/dist
uglifyjs --compress --mangle -- bundle.js > min.js

[curran]

To be clear, what I'm proposing is that we introduce a new file in the NPM package for ShareDB (that's not tracked in Git), which is a Rollup-based UMD build of sharedb/lib/client.

[curran]

Managed to get the browser build down to 68KB using Closure compiler.

[curran]

It might make sense for this to even be a downstream package from ShareDB. That would satisfy the need as well.

[curran]

So I got this working. Thinking to publish this on NPM as sharedb-client-browser.

https://github.com/curran/sharedb-client-browser

Thoughts?

[curran]

Got the bundle down to 65kB using a more up to date Node polyfill library.

[curran]

It's working.

https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/sharedb-client-browser@1.0.0/sharedb-client-browser.min.js

[curran]

Turns out such a small bundle was a pipe dream. Closure compiler renamed fields, which broke ShareDB. After switching to "simple" compilation mode, everything actually works and the bundle is 83.6 kB.

[curran]

Closing as this is done, albeit externally to mainline ShareDB.

If there is any interest in including the browser build in mainline ShareDB feel free to reopen!

[curran]

Reopening as this is not really a solved problem.

ShareDB does not provide a build in its NPM distribution that is compatible with widely used tools like Vite, as demonstrated in #598

Ideally ShareDB would provide a build for the client entrypoint that is compatible with Vite and other build systems that do not have built-in support for Node polyfills.

Proposal

Introduce a new asset published to NPM that is a pre-built bundle of the client-side only.

For consumers of ShareDB, instead of saying

import sharedb from 'sharedb/lib/client'

we could say

import sharedb from 'sharedb/lib/client-browser.js'

To produce client-browser.js, the prepublish step of ShareDB itself could include a step that runs sharedb/lib/client through browserify, much like the examples do, which would include the appropriate Node polyfills.

Thoughts?