sapper

Sapper is a term used for more than one thing. In a military context, a sapper is a soldier who performs combat engineering tasks. The name derives from sap, the undermining of fortifications during siege operations. Sappers are responsible for constructing and repairing field fortifications and trenches, laying and clearing mines, demolitions, breaching obstacles, and building bridges or rapid fortifications under combat conditions. They work within engineer units and require training in explosives, surveying, and demolition, often operating close to the front lines.

Sapper is also the name of a web development framework for building universal applications with the Svelte frontend framework. It provides server-side rendering, client-side hydration, routing, code-splitting, and service worker integration for progressive web apps. Sapper projects use a file-based router, can be deployed to Node.js or serverless environments via adapters, and support prefetching and dynamic routes. With the rise of SvelteKit, Sapper's development activity has declined and it is generally considered superseded; new projects are usually directed toward SvelteKit, with existing Sapper apps migrating over time.

Two uses are unrelated aside from sharing a historical term.