Hydrogen is a framework that combines React and Vite for creating custom storefronts on Shopify. It maximizes performance for end-users and provides a best-in-class developer experience for you and your team. Since it focuses on evergreen browsers, Hydrogen can leverage modern capabilities, best practices, and the latest tooling in web development to bring the future of ecommerce closer. Creating a framework requires a lot of choices for frontend tooling. One major part of it is the bundler. Traditionally, developers had no native way to organize their code in JavaScript modules. Therefore, to minimize the amount of code and waterfall requests in the browser, new frontend tools like Webpack started to appear, powering projects such as Next.js and many more. Bundling code became the de facto practice for the last decade, especially when using view libraries like React or Vue. Whereas these tools successfully solved the problem, they quickly became hard to understand and maintain due to the increasing complexity of the modern web. On top of that, the development process started to slow down because bundling and compiling are inherently slow: the more files in a project, the more work the tool needs to do. Repeat this process for every change made in a project during active development, and one can quickly notice how the developer experience (DX) tanks. Bundle-based dev server image from Vite.js docs Thanks to the introduction of ES Modules (a native mechanism to author JavaScript modules) and its support in browsers, some new players like Snowpack and Parcel appeared and started shaping up the modern web development landscape. Native ESM-based dev server from Vite.js docs This new generation of web tooling aims to improve the DX of building apps. Whereas Webpack needs a complex configuration, even for simple things due to its high flexibility, these new tools provide very sensible but configurable default values. Furthermore, they leverage native ES Modules to minimize the amount of bundling required during development. In particular, they tend to
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