babel-service

On demand targeted transpiling inside the browser's ServiceWorker

ES Feature Tests + Babel = <3

Main idea

ServiceWorker that runs ES6 feature tests and transpiles the incoming application code as needed. Each tested feature can map to a Babel plugin. For example, if the browser already supports ES6 default parameters, then do not transpile them!

Demo

You can see demo at https://babel-service-demo.herokuapp.com. Make sure to use a modern browser with ServiceWorker support (Chrome, Chrome Canary, Opera). Firefox should work if you enable a flag, but I had problem running Babel JS inside Firefox.

What you should see: once a page registers a babel-service ServiceWorker, it should reload itself. The ServiceWorker will intercept a file app.js that contains a ES6 source code that uses default parameters.

// app.js
function add (a, b = 1) {
  console.log('adding', a, b)
  return a + b
}

If your browser already supports them natively, the code will be returned from the babel-service unchanged. If your browser does NOT support default parameters, the source code will be transpiled using Babel.

Screenshots

The downloaded app.js is appended at the bottom of the page for clarity. First, the Chrome 47 without default parameter support - it gets the transpiled version.

On the other hand, Chrome Canary 49 already supports default parameters and does not need this feature transpiled

Details

Feature testing code taken from this source file. It runs when the ServiceWorker is installed.

Babel.js was built from babel-standalone

Small print

Author: Gleb Bahmutov © 2015

• @bahmutov
• glebbahmutov.com
• blog

License: MIT - do anything with the code, but don't blame me if it does not work.

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Support: if you find any problems with this module, email / tweet / open issue on Github

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2015 Gleb Bahmutov

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.