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Brunch: Replace gulp, grunt and increase your dev speed

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Re: Brunch: Replace gulp, grunt and increase your dev speed

#41

Post by ville »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #16

You definitely need a comparison with webpack. As far as I can tell from a quick scan, webpack has all of the capabilities that brunch does. More importantly, it's much more popular, so the plugins and help you need are likely to be available.

I felt the same way. I'm already sold on the idea of using a proper build tool instead of a generic task runner (happy webpack user for 1.5 years).

Instead of telling why it is better than Grunt or Gulp, I'd like to know how it compares to webpack (or browserify, which seems to be quite close to webpack in functionality nowadays, http://reactpodcast.com/2015/06/webpack-vs-browserify/)

Re: Brunch: Replace gulp, grunt and increase your dev speed

#42

Post by pbreit »

evmar wrote: post #10

It looks like this document is a work in progress. Were you looking for feedback on the document? I have used build systems like this (and webpack) so I think I am the sort of person you're looking to win over. The heavy use of bolding makes this read like a pyramid scam and made it hard for me to take it seriously. In all documentation, my main feedback is: the more words you use, the less you're respecting your rea…

Yep. Way, way, way too verbose. Trim it by 90%.

Re: Brunch: Replace gulp, grunt and increase your dev speed

#44

Post by Semiapies »

xixixao wrote: post #29
jorblume wrote: post #18

The worst part about web dev is the amount of time spent investigating every little new tool that comes out. It could be useful, it could not, how do you know unless you investigate it yourself? You could easily spend 20+ hours a week just evaluating tools. And not only that, but some of the most adopted tool aren't performant. Grunt sucks. It really does. Angular is needlessly confusing and overly complex for what i…

The worst part about the comments under any "JS" submission is the amount of time I have to spend to weed through all the "there are too many tools" comments. Brunch is older than Grunt and Gulp, how is your comment in any way relevant? If this was a post about the advantages of Java over Go would you complain about the amount of time you have to spend investigating various language platforms? The world is changing r…

Yes, the endless complaining that something new-to-the-poster exists is the most tedious aspect of HN. Nobody has time to look at anything new, but they have plenty of time to bitch about it at length.

If people said to themselves, "Nope, don't have time to read some docs," and went about their business without dropping coder angst-bombs, there might actually be useful comments to read that would help someone decide whether looking into Brunch or whatever was worth the time.

Re: Brunch: Replace gulp, grunt and increase your dev speed

#45

Post by wvenable »

1235971235 wrote: post #20

Created an account for this post only. As a novice javascript programmer, I am hugely confused by the variety of tools being recommended on Hacker News. Choosing and setting up tooling was harder than writing my first app in React. Not a new complaint, I know, but: Is there anything like a best practice in modern javascript development that someone can point me to? Or is there a site that gathers the setups used by p…

I'm an experienced web developer but most of my projects were started a decade ago. I decided to use all modern tools and techniques for a very small (think two database tables) application. It had to work on mobile and have a good UI.

And on my god, the tools, so many tools. And so much boilerplate. And so much plumbing. I've spent only 50% of my time so far doing actual coding and the remaining 50% configuring tools, pulling down packages, pulling down tools which install other packages, and so on.

Now I will fully admit, the tools are very cool and the results are good but it still feels a bit ridiculous.

Re: Brunch: Replace gulp, grunt and increase your dev speed

#46

Post by latchkey »

I like the configuration over code approach, but I feel like brunch swings too much into the direction of configuration without being able to code. There needs to be a middle ground because there will always be a need for specialized tasks without having to rely on creating plugins.

I stuck with gulp, but got rid of the repetitive nature of declaring the same task code over and over again by creating a centralized set of functions which generate the tasks for me from configuration and a simple API to execute those functions.

This had some other positive side effects, such as making my package.json and gulpfile much smaller. I can also create fixes / features to tasks and all my projects benefit immediately. The main downside to this centralization is that if you need a specific version of a dependency, you have to fork my project and update separately. That said, brunch effectively has this same issue.

A lot of the OP's complaints such as slow build times and incremental builds can be solved with a proper pipeline in gulp, but it is harder than it should be to do and really hard to do if you are copying a bunch of random tasks from projects strewn all over the web. wtf is plumber? =)

Anyway, I published my little project if you're interested in using it. I use it on a daily basis so it will be actively maintained for a long time to come. I welcome PR's for additional tasks that you think others could use.

https://github.com/lookfirst/gulp-helpers

https://www.npmjs.com/package/gulp-helpers

Re: Brunch: Replace gulp, grunt and increase your dev speed

#47

Post by agrippanux »

pluma wrote: post #40
_broody wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree with you here. Brunch is fantastic for its minimal config requirements and super-fast performance. Oddly enough, in the JS world I've found it best to ignore all the hype around the latest and newest framework, and just go with something that has a small and loyal following and stick with it. I mean, look at all the people who moved to working with Angular because it was "made by Google, so you could tr…

At the time I'd been as long with AngularJS as I have been with React now, I despised AngularJS and wanted to violently murder past-me who decided to use it. With React I'm still as confident in my choice as I was a week into using it. In fact, the more I get to know it, the more confident I grow. With AngularJS, it was quite the opposite. If anything I'd say that AngularJS being promoted by Google only made me more…

I wrote Angular for 18 months and this is 100% the process I went through and the decisions I came to.

Re: Brunch: Replace gulp, grunt and increase your dev speed

#48

Post by graffitici »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #16

You definitely need a comparison with webpack. As far as I can tell from a quick scan, webpack has all of the capabilities that brunch does. More importantly, it's much more popular, so the plugins and help you need are likely to be available.

I agree that Webpack is a serious competitor, and it's rather odd to not even mention it [1]. But I don't think Webpack does incremental compilation, since it usually takes quite a long time for me to compile my modestly-sized assets..

[1] https://github.com/brunch/brunch-guide/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93...

Re: Brunch: Replace gulp, grunt and increase your dev speed

#49

Post by mikewhy »

cozuya wrote: post #31
mikewhy wrote: post #8

have always been a huge fan of brunch but lately wanted to take advantage of Gulp and Browserify ( https://github.com/mikew/browserify-brunch doesn't really cut it) so I wrote parched[1] and parched-tasks-webapp[2] [1] https://github.com/raisedmedia/parched [2] https://github.com/raisedmedia/parched-tasks-webapp

I haven't seen anything that matches what gulp can do to make both browserify and babel have working sourcemaps.

It's a great combo. For a while though, Brunch did very similar things, sourcemaps et al, with very little configuration (which is still very clever when you need it).

With parched, the idea is very similar:

   npm install parched parched-tasks-webapp parched-babel
And you're good to go.

Re: Brunch: Replace gulp, grunt and increase your dev speed

#50

Post by pluma »

xixixao wrote: post #29
jorblume wrote: post #18

The worst part about web dev is the amount of time spent investigating every little new tool that comes out. It could be useful, it could not, how do you know unless you investigate it yourself? You could easily spend 20+ hours a week just evaluating tools. And not only that, but some of the most adopted tool aren't performant. Grunt sucks. It really does. Angular is needlessly confusing and overly complex for what i…

The worst part about the comments under any "JS" submission is the amount of time I have to spend to weed through all the "there are too many tools" comments. Brunch is older than Grunt and Gulp, how is your comment in any way relevant? If this was a post about the advantages of Java over Go would you complain about the amount of time you have to spend investigating various language platforms? The world is changing r…

I'd also like to point out that even as a Java or C++ programmer you can easily fall behind. I've had the pleasure of working with a "dark matter" Java programmer who had been doing practically the same thing for ten years. He was contemplating reading into some "new technologies" -- none of which was any younger than five years and even so there was no viable upgrade path from where he was.
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