Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify • Hacker News Board

Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify

#111

Post by Wintamute » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 2:18 PM UTC

noname123 wrote: post #37

This is a tangential question, but how do front-end people feel about the constant change in the field? I worked in the front-end and followed the trends for years and have found the changes difficult to follow. In 1997, the rage was VB and lots of cottage companies set up and advertising custom ActiveX widgets, on the web one had to learn ColdFusion and HTML/CSS. In early 2000's, VB6 was retired in favor of .net and…

I'm 33 and a frontender. To be honest, it doesn't bother me too much. I think there are a core set of skills that see you through all of the change. Things like: knowing how to work well in teams, working well with graphic designers, experience with how sites work in terms of UX, web service integration, good understanding of backend structures and HTTP, estimating on projects, dealing with clients, dealing with management ... these are the tricky things that make good developers great to have on projects I think. None of the new tooling, workflow and languages that come around are rocket science, and you can get up to speed on something in a few hours, especially if you have knowledge and experience of what came before and the problems the new tools are trying to solve. I still enjoy learning new things, I don't think we can expect the rate of change to slow down - if anything it may speed up. Its a young industry, nobody knows the right way to do things yet, let alone what the "end game" state of interactive information delivery to humans will look like!

Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify

#112

Post by kevincennis » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 2:18 PM UTC

stefan_kendall wrote: post #110

Yay. Another week to waste rebuilding all the builds and fixing all the continuous integration jobs. Is anyone else thoroughly unexcited about all this playing in the sand? We're building products; why do we spend so much time and money on build tool churn? I avoid build tools whenever possible (using built-in build commands and things like compass), but when I do need a build, I just use Rake. My toolchain stays the…

I'm not sure anyone is seriously suggesting that you take an existing project that's already using Grunt and convert it to Gulp.

But if there's a new build tool that I've heard good things about next time I start a new project, I think it's worth a bit of investigation to see whether or not it might serve my needs better than what I've been using.

Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify

#113

Post by pyre » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 2:23 PM UTC

indolering wrote: post #38

skrebbel wrote: post #29

The one thing that keeps me from using browserify or webpack or the likes, is dev time debugging. It's not very useful to find that line 13729 of script.js threw an exception. Source maps may help, but many browsers don't support them, and I want to be able to debug everywhere. Plus, when the browserified js actually came from Coffeescript or TypeScript or the likes, I already have source maps in place. Can browserif…

Unable to find the link/name at the moment but there is a method (it isn't vanilla source-map) for this which basically wraps the modules into self-executing functions and it shows up in Firefox and Chrome as distinct files. It was related to source-map but not However, I have found Chrome and Firefox's support to be buggy.

Maybe you're thinking of webmake. The sourceURL lines that it uses in the eval() sections resolve correctly on Chrome, but Firefox+Firebug don't seem to work for me.

The webmake site references a bug in Firebug that was resolved ~1 year ago, but I still have issues it with. I end up swapping back and forth between Firefox+Firebug and Chrome to get all of the debugging features that I want.

Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify

#114

Post by mikewhy » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 2:23 PM UTC

pedalpete wrote: post #44

pfrrp wrote: post #20

Skip the require vs browserify debate and use https://github.com/webpack/webpack . Allows for amd commonjs and almost any other format around. With gulp and grunt plugins!

I've been messing around with require.js and browserify all day, but I don't really LOVE either solution for a large angular app. I'm going to give webpack a try. Thanks

Our team is using Brunch on an Angular app and the proper module system on top of Angular's "module" system does indeed feel wrong.

Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify

#115

Post by grayrest » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 2:26 PM UTC

noname123 wrote: post #37

This is a tangential question, but how do front-end people feel about the constant change in the field? I worked in the front-end and followed the trends for years and have found the changes difficult to follow. In 1997, the rage was VB and lots of cottage companies set up and advertising custom ActiveX widgets, on the web one had to learn ColdFusion and HTML/CSS. In early 2000's, VB6 was retired in favor of .net and…

I've always enjoyed the change and the re-start of standardization efforts reminds me of the fun of bad old days without the massive browser incompatibility. For me the transitions weren't about being "forced" to do anything but rather a continuing quest to find something that sucks less. I've been on the w3c/mozilla bandwagon since '98 so I've avoided 90% of the plugin thrashing you mention. The DOM libraries are different interfaces over the same underlying API so they work the same. For the MVC libraries, I've been exploring the space since 2008 (I was writing docs to release my version of the Backbone library when Jeremy released Backbone and his code was better) so I don't see it as new and upcoming. Having a build seemed obvious when I started writing 10k+ sloc apps since I'm not going to put it in one source file and making 30 requests for js is terrible and I had a rake script I copy/pasted around for years before the node build systems showed up. AMD always seemed like a solution in search of a problem to me and I just concatenate everything.

For what it's worth, we're about to go through another generational shift in frontend tech. There are a few major developments in the pipeline: ES6 generators and Web Components. Generators allow for different async flow control patterns [1] which greatly changes the feel when writing JS. Component systems (Ember, Angular, Polymer, React) offer significantly improved state control and huge code savings. If you aren't already using one, you will be in the near future but it's still early enough that it's unclear which will come out on top. There's a set of emerging standards work around enabling self-contained Web Components (shadow DOM, template tag, scoped CSS) but these don't dictate how you structure your code so there's still room for conflict.

[1] https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/blob/master/API.md#...

Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify

#116

Post by mikewhy » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 2:29 PM UTC

For front-end apps it's hard to not recommend Brunch[1]. It gives you the module system of Browserify and some of the build power of Gulp/Grunt with much less configuration.

[1]: http://brunch.io/

Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify

#117

Post by exodust » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 2:36 PM UTC

noname123 wrote: post #37

This is a tangential question, but how do front-end people feel about the constant change in the field? I worked in the front-end and followed the trends for years and have found the changes difficult to follow. In 1997, the rage was VB and lots of cottage companies set up and advertising custom ActiveX widgets, on the web one had to learn ColdFusion and HTML/CSS. In early 2000's, VB6 was retired in favor of .net and…

HTML/CSS, .net, PHP, LAMP, AJAX, Jquery, HTML5, Backbone, Grunt, PORN, Gonzo, Anal, Sasha Grey, Scala, Python, C++

Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify

#118

Post by ElongatedTowel » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 2:37 PM UTC

n1ghtmare_ wrote: post #95

peter_l_downs wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm frankly overwhelmed of learning and being exposed to new technologies. The physical draining feeling of learning new keywords to fulfill the same urges is as if I have watched 15 years of porn following from the grainy days of Jenna Jameson on VHS to the heady-days of Internet dial-up gonzo porn of the early 2000's that really explored anal (Gauge, Taylor Rain) to the streaming flash videos of Web 2.0 (Sasha Grey…

The man really knows his porn.

Moral of the story is, if you spend the time you're watching porn on programming instead you would be a master of all these technologies.

Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify

#119

Post by stblack » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 2:43 PM UTC

TheZenPsycho wrote: post #46

noname123 wrote: post #37

This is a tangential question, but how do front-end people feel about the constant change in the field? I worked in the front-end and followed the trends for years and have found the changes difficult to follow. In 1997, the rage was VB and lots of cottage companies set up and advertising custom ActiveX widgets, on the web one had to learn ColdFusion and HTML/CSS. In early 2000's, VB6 was retired in favor of .net and…

It's all just marginal convergence towards "best", and in real practice, most of this "progress" can and should be ignored. For every tool, wait it out until it's been around and still in active use/development/maintenance for at least 5 full years. But always stay playing. Always try out the new things, because some of them may just scratch a burning itch. Fear not age, because if you've been around long enough, and…

This.

One mod: 5 years is a very long time in this space. Node itself is but 5-years old.

Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify

#120

Post by mattgreenrocks » Mon, Feb 03, 2014, 2:44 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #59

noname123 wrote: post #37

This is a tangential question, but how do front-end people feel about the constant change in the field? I worked in the front-end and followed the trends for years and have found the changes difficult to follow. In 1997, the rage was VB and lots of cottage companies set up and advertising custom ActiveX widgets, on the web one had to learn ColdFusion and HTML/CSS. In early 2000's, VB6 was retired in favor of .net and…

Full-stack dev that came up through the front-end ranks here - I'm in my early 30s and have been doing this in some form or another for 17 years. I started with Perl and C CGI scripts, worked with Java Swing (on the desktop) for a while, had a brief foray into MFC, did a whole bunch of PHP in college, switched to Django/JQuery while working on my startup, and now use a whole bunch of Google-proprietary techniques alo…

I've always seen 'boutique' development as something that eventually requires transcending frameworks in favor of optimally architected code. uTorrent is an example of a high caliber of development.

In a world where people relentlessly defend good enough (generally, engineering advice on HN is often straight-up amateur hour), it's telling that great sometimes requires abandoning the tools that hipsters clamor for.

All you need is a great UI design, good architecture, and a keen eye for details.