- 🎓 You already know it - it is just a static server that delivers your application code files
- 🏂 Zero configuration - one command and you are good to go
- 🏋️ Supports all kinds of frameworks: Polymer, Svelte, Vue, React, Angular and many others out of the box
- 😎 Understands all popular formats
.js,.jsx,.mjs,.es6,.svelte,.vue,.ts,.tsx,.coffee,.json,.css,.scss,.sass,.less,.htmland.pug - 🎁️ Delivers without bundling to reflect project structure in the browser and make it easier to understand and develop
- 🦋 Makes debugging a pleasure - NO MORE missing sourcemaps and obfuscated bundles, situations when you can't put a breakpoint on the line or expression, ugly webpack names behind the code and empty debugging tooltips
- 🕸 Relies on the latest web standards - so you can use cutting edge features even if your browser lacks them
- ⚡ Light and fast - ships minimum that is required with no bundlers overhead, only the files you change are delivered
Get Visual Studio Code Extension and run hq with single Go Live button click.
Install it once with npm
npm install -g @hqjs/hqRun inside project root
hqit will find your source code and serve it.
There are many development tools out there, including browserify, webpack, rollup and parcel, that provide development servers. But all of them rely on bundling. While bundling might still be usefull for production, it makes the development experience quite a struggle.
Without bundling hq dramatically increases development speed by shipping only files that were changed and improves debugging by providing minimal transformation to a source.
With hq you can start a new project instantly. Just type hq and you are ready for experiments. It supports all kinds of frameworks out of the box, so there is no need to learn all their different tools and know all the buzzwords.
It is worth to say that hq requires no configuration, offering the familiar experience of working with a regular static server.
hq serves every file individually as requested, same way regular static server does. That gives you only very simple dead code elimination without proper tree shaking, but on the other hand a lot of time that was wasted for dependency analysis is being saved. All transforamtions are instant and performed on the fly. If you use modern browser and stick to the standard your code would hardly be changed at all.
While you try to follow the standards, you can't guarantee that all that libraries that you depend on will do the same. Most of them will probably use commonjs modules format and won't work in the browser just as they are. hq takes care of that as well and transforms commonjs modules into ESM, handles non standard, but pretty common imports (like css or json importing) and destructure importing objects when it is required.
hq will work tightly with the browser, using its cache system to speed up asset delivery and only delivers what has been changed. It will automatically reload the page when you modify the code so you will see the feedback immediatly.
It can work with many different frameworks, but does not rely on any of that frameworks' code in particular. Instead hq performs ast transformations with babel through plugins that were designed for hq to help it understand all diversity of different technologies and technics used in those frameworks.
Let's say we have an existing angular project and want to improve development experience with hq.
First of all, we need to add our global style file and script to the head and body of index.html correspondingly. So when hq serves index, it will serve styles and scripts as well
<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
...
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles.css">
</head>
<body>
<app-root></app-root>
<script src="/main.ts"></script>
</body>
</html>Second is a very angular specific problem - it depends on zones and Reflect.metadata APIs that are on very early stages and are not supported by hq out of the box. In fact angular includes them in file polyfills.ts and adds the file to your build. So we are going to use the file and import it on top of main.ts
import 'core-js/proposals/reflect-metadata';
import 'zone.js/dist/zone';
import 'zone.js/dist/zone-patch-canvas';
...And that's it, now you are ready to start developing by running
hqin the project root.
It might help to serve small projects with very little dependencies. But general the answer is no, not yet. However, it is really good for development. The production solution is currently a WIP and it is going to reduce all the pain that modern web application building and deployment usually demands.
With hq you don't need to take care of babel configuration, the latest ecma script standard (including class properties and decorators) will be supported out of the box. However if you need to support a feature that does not have a common interpretation (like svg react imports) or experimental features from an early stage (like optional chaining), just add .babelrc configuration to the root of your project with the list of all desired plugins
{
"plugins": [
"@babel/plugin-proposal-optional-chaining"
]
}and it will be automatically merged with hq configuration.