Consider integrationing with Vite instead of custom dev server

[ScottAwesome]

First and foremost I want to say this is an amazing project, and I like how it initially started out.

However, I think its safe to say that vite has very clearly taken the lead in the next gen web development platforms. @web/dev-server has 20,067 weekly downloads, as opposed to vite's 585,897.

I think its clear that vite is leading the way here, and I don't see any major differences between vite and @web/dev-server that couldn't be solved via plugins (which vite supports fully via a rollup like interface).

I believe switching to vite would lead to a wider adoption of other projects under the @web namespace, most notably @web/test-runner, not to mention efforts for improving developer experience could be shared in one underlying project, and could share in the broader and ever growing vite ecosystem. I think vite has been around long enough that its established front running is very unlikely to be upended any time soon.

Not to mention, vite solves the issue that none of the current projects under the @web banner solve the issue of building your projects, you have to run a separate rollup pipeline for that. That means there would be gains in functionality as well, without major additional efforts.

I think it would really lead to an explosion of growth and adoption for other @web projects (including rocket) if it was able to tap into the energy of the vite community and its ecosystem.

[LarsDenBakker]

@web/dev-server (WDS) and it's predecessor es-dev-server actually existed before vite, when everyone was still using webpack dev server, and I think it inspired some of the technical foundations of vite when the project started. At least some things looked very familiar at the time :)

I do see a major difference between vite and WDS in both the philosophy and implementation. vite implements/promotes using non-standard coding patterns to benefit DX while WDS sticks purely to web standards while sometimes sacrificing DX until standard patterns emerge. For open-wc / modern-web it's important that the code you write can run in a modern browser without requiring processing by a build tool.

That being said it's true that vite has risen to a prominent position and pushing modern frontend development further. Supporting it with web test runner will be beneficial for many projects. Because of the reasons above, we should keep WDS as the default server for WTR. But we should be able to support using vite as a plugin. I've suggested in the past also to the maintainers of vite.

We already have something similar for snowpack: https://github.com/withastro/snowpack/tree/main/plugins/web-test-runner-plugin that can be a good starting point. We might need to make some more changes in test runner core, we are open to that if anyone is willing to look into it.

[pndewit]

@ScottAwesome I took a stab at creating a tiny WTR plugin to support Vite: web-test-runner-vite-plugin

Let me know what you think 😄

[NullVoxPopuli]

does it work in 2023? I'm running in to this: #2272 (comment)