在生产中使用Babel的正确方法

Question

I want to use babel to transform modern javascript to plain old ES5 JavaScript.

I used the first tool on babel 's website "Prototyping-In the browser" and on the website it says

"... if you are working on a production site you should be precompiling your scripts server-side"

after using that prototyping tool, the browser's console says

"... Be sure to precompile your scripts for production"

as a result I checked the second tool "Babel built-ins CLI" and used it with the help of node.js to generate the compatible JS scripts, the website doesn't mention the same message about production as the first tool I used, although the resulting code is almost the same.

My question is can I grab the resulting JS scripts from the "Babel CLI" tool and just replace the current ones? is that enough for production? Are they considered precompiled?

Note that I am not using node.js, it is just a javascript application.

Searching around the web got me many results about precompiling JS such as using webpack and Browserify and now I am lost about the state of the files generated from Babel, are they ready to be used or should they be precompiled.

I am posting this question out of confusion, so my apologies if it sounds stupid or not reasonable.

Answer 1

Can I grab the resulting JS scripts from the "Babel CLI" tool and just replace the current ones? Is that enough for production?

Yes, that would work. However you will want to avoid this manual step of copying scripts into a web tool for every little change you make during development. It's better to work with an automated build flow.

Searching around the web got me many results about precompiling JS such as using webpack and Browserify

Babel only transpiles new syntax to old syntax. Webpack and Browserify also bundle modules into a single script that can be loaded into a webpage.