Code splitting react-router routes with webpack 2

idea.md

NOTE: Sokra confirmed I had a misunderstanding, Webpack is still a static build tool and the below won't work. It's still a nice concept though...

With webpack 1, code splitting react-router routes is quite tedious. It requires us to repeat the getComponent function over and over again. (See here for an explanation how it works with webpack 1)

Example:

<Router history={history}>
  <Route
    path="/"
    getComponent={(location, callback) => {
      require.ensure([], function (require) {
        callback(null, require('./HomePage.jsx'));
      });
    }}
  />
  <Route
    path="/about"
    getComponent={(location, callback) => {
      require.ensure([], function (require) {
        callback(null, require('./AboutPage.jsx'));
      });
    }}
  />
</Router>

The getComponent function is almost the same across all routes, that's not very DRY. The problem is that with webpack v1, it needed the requires as static strings because it analyses the code before evaluation, and it needs to somehow determine there which modules should go into seperate chunks.

With webpack 2 though, we're getting System.import and dynamic expressions! (src) This'll make code splitting react-router routes so much easier. Imagine a component like this:

class Page extends React.Component {
  render() {
    <Route
      path={this.props.path}
      getComponent={(location, callback) => {
        System.import(this.props.component)
          .then((component) => {
            callback(null, component);
          });
      }
  }
}

Used like this:

<Router history={history}>
  <Page path="/about" component="./AboutPage.jsx" />
</Router>

And all of these <Page>s are now in seperate chunks! Code splitting react-router routes: easy with webpack 2.

Note: This is just an idea, none of the new code above is tested.

salut
comment vous allez hi how are you