Do you use Cesium with webpack, Browserify, RequireJS, Dojo, etc..?

CesiumJS
1

Quick question: Do you use Cesium with a build system such as webpack, Browserify, RequireJS, Dojo, or something else?

We are looking at improving out of the box support for various build systems and wanted to hear from our users as to what is the most popular.

In particular, does anyone use the Dojo build at all? Since the beginning, Cesium has shipped with some files to make it easy to use the Dojo build process, but these files cause problems for webpack and browserify (both of which I think are more popular these days). We’d like to remove them but just wanted to reach out to the community first. It will be easy to still use the Dojo build once they are gone, but would require a simple extra step.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks,

Matt

2

One of our applications uses Require.js to import the combined/minified Cesium.js, and we use r.js to bundle that file with our other 3rd-party libs for deployment.

I’m currently in the planning stages for throwing out the GWT client for our other app and rewriting it from scratch in modern JS. I’m looking at using Webpack for that. Not entirely sure yet how Cesium would fit into that picture, given that the NPM package appears to be published semi-intermittently, and isn’t even from you guys.

3

Matt,

I’m using Gulp with my own build system, works pretty well. Would be nice to have everything converted over to CommonJS, makes it easier to work with Browserify.

-TJ

4

I just finished a webgl mooc using es6 and JSPM. Module syntax is easy but the loader is difficult. WebPack is tempting but I went with JSPM because it appears to be more standards oriented. It also had a totally dynamic mode that required no workflow other than installing JSPM.

I find most workflow really annoying so it was surprising using JSPM required none at all!

After using it in dynamic mode, I tried “bundling” which pre-compiles (traceur or babel). This converts all the code used by the page into a single es5 file and worked fine for the 5 mooc assignments. It did require a modified HTML file due to es6 using no tags … so you need to add one for your bundle.

I haven’t tried integrating my new found webgl stuff into Cesium yet, but I definitely am not going back to es5, its es6 and modules all the way!

I don’t think I’m alone so my advice would be to consider es6/JSPM as a potential approach by Cesium devs.

5

Thanks for the feedback guys. I think the short term changes we want to make are inline with where everyone wants us to head with the longer term goal of making Cesium much more friendly with a variety of module loaders.