This post reminds me of the joke about the Native Americans getting ready for winter[1] [1] http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2008/11/...
That's great - I can use that whenever the topic of 'the echo-chamber' comes up.
Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify
81–90 of 163 posts
Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Perhaps I'm just rusty but age has only made me cautious. I'm responsible for a rather large and complicated UI framework that we use internally. The thing I've discovered over the last 5-6 years is that APIs are volatile as are JavaScript libraries, browsers and security concerns. It's terribly hard picking something that you can rely on. Even jQuery has enough breaking changes for me to have a week long task gettin…
>We have over 400 complicated web app pages that need testing to make sure we haven't broken any edge cases.
Reading your comment I get the feeling the impression that testing these pages is time consuming and difficult.
What kind of QA automation do you have in place?
Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify
#83This 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 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) to the now completely
splintered and social-mediafied porno-world with all the mind-numbing
categories under the sun (reality, high-art, webcam etc). I'm simply
drained and spent.
Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify
#84This 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…
There's a few things going on here that combine to cause this mess. First, task runners, like templating systems and module bundlers, are easy to write so there are lots of them. Grunt in particular doesn't bring anything to the table that bash scripts don't. Second, most open-source projects don't make their value prop clear (I learned this the hard way first-hand and I'm still dealing with it) and most people don't…
> Grunt in particular doesn't bring anything to the table that bash scripts don't
One thing that comes to mind is cross-platform builds, which in some scenarios is very useful.
Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify
#85This 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…
be realistic, this is akin to your team changing a few lines in a makefile, sigh, javascript people,
You're like Lance Armstrong after he retired from road cycling and decided to get into mountain biking because it'd be so easy to stomp the competition in a race with merely 20 miles of distance and 5000' of climbing. Needless to say he got his ass handed to him because there was a whole world of technical skills which he did not even know existed. Riding up a rutted, rocky, rooty slope does not allow you to stand up and leverage your superior legs and lungs because guess what your back wheel just slipped out and you wasted a ton of energy falling over.
Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify
#86And again I'll remind people what happened in Java land: ANT -> Ivy/Maven -> Gradle I'll state it clearly: Grunt. is. Ant. It's a mess to follow a build script and a ritual to make it work in a real life project. I expected a tool like gulp to come sweeping in and it did, I'm extremely happy about that and started migrating away from the horrible tooling that is Grunt. I never understood how people can tolerate Grunt…
I'd say Grunt is Maven because IDEs have no way to figure out beforehand what the build process will do.
Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify
#87This 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…
It the best practice of a wise developer is to wait 5 years before touching a tool then that tool will be tested only by unwise people.
Devote 2% of your time and try out some of the things once in a while; don't bet on them but at least be a small part of the community which will make them either better of fail.
Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify
#88This 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 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…
Ah, so that's why it's called analogy!
Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps I'm just rusty but age has only made me cautious. I'm responsible for a rather large and complicated UI framework that we use internally. The thing I've discovered over the last 5-6 years is that APIs are volatile as are JavaScript libraries, browsers and security concerns. It's terribly hard picking something that you can rely on. Even jQuery has enough breaking changes for me to have a week long task gettin…
>We have over 400 complicated web app pages that need testing to make sure we haven't broken any edge cases. Reading your comment I get the feeling the impression that testing these pages is time consuming and difficult. What kind of QA automation do you have in place?
A lot but it's not perfect by any means and it's very time consuming as the test suites take 8h+ to run.
Re: Grunt and RequireJS are out, it's all about Gulp and Browserify
#90How often do you have so many dependencies in a web app that you actually need something like RequireJS or Browserify?
I have an anecdote for that. I work at a bank and in the past two years we've built a front-end for investment banking using BackboneJS and some other frameworks. This application has close to 200 views, 26 routers, and probably 200-300 models/collections, totaling at about 30K lines of front-end code. You really have to use RequireJS or Browserify for a project of that scale, or even for any non-trivial project.
New projects (and the one I'm working on atm) are built in AngularJS, which has a built-in dependency system. We're not going to use RequireJS as a script loader anymore; in practice, it'll just load all the files on application load, which doesn't really add anything. I like Angular's simple approach of just loading a bunch of scripts using script tags. The existing application is going to get rewritten in Angular too, it's expected that it'll need a lot less code.