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Grunt 1.0.0 released

gruntjs.com

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Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#31

Post by rkwz »

igl wrote: post #9

Obsolete before it hit 1.0. While grunt/gulp was fun for a while... i am not looking back to our 800 line grunt file, complicated async configuration and the tons of dev-dependencies. Webpack blew everything out of the water. 80 lines of config, hot-reloading, code-spliting, hash-filenames... Looking forward to whats coming next.

The problem with Webpack is that if you want to do something that's not straightforward[1] or covered in the dozen tutorials that are on the web, you're going to have a hard time.

The docs are very basic and there are so many configuration params.

If you want to do something that's not covered in tutorials or boilerplates, be prepared to spend a ridiculous amount of time reading Webpack PRs, issues and the codebase.

Webpack does a great job and it's a nice concept but it has very bad documentation.

[1] Isomorphic apps, or multiple builds for i18n etc

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#32

Post by Jgrubb »

neeel wrote: post #25

I spent a minute scanning that website and I still don't know what it does. Is it that hard to have a link along the top leading to an ELI5 blurb

It's a build tool, written in node, so it was the first front end build tool that saw wide usage 3-4 years ago. Used for things like concatenating and minifying your CSS and JS for production.

It was succeeded by Gulp, which was succeeded by Browserify, which was succeeded by Webpack, and then I moved to the backend because fuck this shit.

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#33

Post by nailer »

Ciantic wrote: post #20
nailer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing this dissuaded me from webpack is that it markets itself on support for AMD and script tags - if you need JS modules that are only available as AMD or script tags in 2016 it's a worry. That said, I use gulp now and a notice lot of gulp seems to be replicating parts of JS itself - tasks are just functions, I don't see why they need to be special. There's always 'gulp foo' which is a less maintained wrapper a…

Markets itself with support for AMD and script tags? What are you talking about, it's all about bundling things automatically without script tags, you don't even need to write the damned html file if you use loader for it. Also it may have support for AMD, but it's key usage is to bundle libraries from npm using commonjs. I'm not saying webpack is all roses (even in version 2), but these two things are not the issue.

You misunderstand what I meant. Nobody has written or suggested that webpack outputs script tags or AMD. I simply stated that webpack markets itself as using script tags and AMD as input, which is true: from the meta description on webpack.github.io:

"Webpack is a module bundler. It packs CommonJs/AMD modules i. e. for the browser"

If you use AMD as input you have to get updates to your libraries separately, and your libraries are bloated since AMD modules tend to use dependencies less.

You should also check out https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#36

Post by progx »

dereke wrote: post #16

I am so pleased I abandoned grunt/gulp. Life is so much simpler with simple build commands. Now I just run whatever I need using npm run.

For simple things, yes npm run is a better option. But with more and more Tasks i prefer cleaner and better readable solution.

Depending on the kind of project and tasks i use grunt / gulp or webpack.

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#39

Post by amelius »

rkwz wrote: post #31
igl wrote: post #9

Obsolete before it hit 1.0. While grunt/gulp was fun for a while... i am not looking back to our 800 line grunt file, complicated async configuration and the tons of dev-dependencies. Webpack blew everything out of the water. 80 lines of config, hot-reloading, code-spliting, hash-filenames... Looking forward to whats coming next.

The problem with Webpack is that if you want to do something that's not straightforward[1] or covered in the dozen tutorials that are on the web, you're going to have a hard time. The docs are very basic and there are so many configuration params. If you want to do something that's not covered in tutorials or boilerplates, be prepared to spend a ridiculous amount of time reading Webpack PRs, issues and the codebase.…

> The problem with Webpack is that if you want to do something that's not straightforward[1] or covered in the dozen tutorials that are on the web, you're going to have a hard time.

I really hate systems that are built like that. Nobody should build software like that.

I just want simple tools with a clear API that I can combine together and easily replace by other tools, like in the Unix tradition.

I guess it is a case of "LEGO versus Playmobil". The former allows modularity, while the latter is just complex crap that allows you to do nothing other than what the instructions say.

Re: Grunt 1.0.0 released

#40

Post by pcr0 »

Jean-Philipe wrote: post #6
kyriakos wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

until the new shiny thing comes and replaces that. I still don't understand what's wrong with grunt (or whats better with gulp).

I never got what's so great about Grunt in the first place, and instead stuck to makefiles. Something like `cat src/*.js | uglify > build.js` would take me a lot more effort to do with Grunt (or Gulp).

If that's all you want to do (concat, minify, convert es6/sass), then by all means, I do agree make is the simpler albeit slightly less maintainable and non-cross-platform solution. I use make for my quick static sites too.

But when you need more features like bundle splitting (app code and libraries live in separate files, for caching), cache-busting, lazy-loading, separate configs for production and development, etc. make doesn't quite cut it IMO.

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