As the creator and maintainer of Half Pipe, I feel I should weigh in here. I agree with the overall sentiment here that it is not ready to be a general-purpose Sprockets replacement, nor am I convinced that it should be. Obviously I have some opinions around using Sprockets, but at the end of the day the Rails asset pipeline got people talking/caring about better asset management, which is what matters most.
I do believe that the Asset Pipeline is currently a little short-sighted. The term itself is a misdirection, as "Asset Pipeline" really means "Sprockets". In order to use anything else, you are essentially monkey-patching, which is what the whole Rails/Merb merge was trying to get rid of. To make something else the default in Rails only exacerbates that problem, it doesn't solve it. I would rather see easier ways to hook into the asset pipeline with our own tools, and make Sprockets optional. I have only just begun to think of what that would look like, so I unfortunately can't propose anything specific right now. This is an important issue though. Now that Rails is a default choice for so many teams, we're seeing more and more specialists needing to code on projects who don't have a competency in Ruby. In fact, many of them are already familiar with the plethora of choices in the Node ecosystem. For them, using Sprockets only slows them down, and makes it harder to reuse existing code. In fact, that's the very reason I looked to Rails as inspiration when building Half Pipe: it generates an opinionated, default Grunt setup, but makes it easy to change that to anything else it needs to be (I have a project right now where I'm using Broccoli & ES6 modules without requirejs, but still used Half Pipe to set it all up). For me, and many other developers I've worked with, using Sprockets (or rails-assets) to abstract away the systems I already use in other projects is more of a curse than a blessing. I know the systems, so I'd rather just use them. At the end of the day, the question of "should Half Pipe replace Sprockets" is not the one we should be asking. The right question is "how do we make it easier for *anything* to replace Sprockets". Would the core team consider approaches that make the asset pipeline more configurable? On Wednesday, June 11, 2014 7:48:00 AM UTC-4, Rodrigo Rosenfeld Rosas wrote: > > On 11-06-2014 03:01, Frank Tellefsen wrote: > > 2014-06-10 0:36 GMT+02:00 Ryan Bigg <[email protected] <javascript:>>: > > > Why would the community do that? What are the benefits? Why is > Sprockets bad? > ... > - Live reload in development mode > > > I'm curious (mostly afraid of, actually) about what this mean. Are you > talking about automatically refreshing the page when the assets change? If > so, I hope this is not enabled by default. I wouldn't use something like > this while developing my application. > > ... > > While I can see how Sprockets is not a good enough solution, I don't > think that forcing users to convert their libraries in a RequireJS module > is a good thing. > > I'm not a big fan of this either, but what are the alternatives? > > > Well, I was never really very fond of RequireJS and haven't used it yet as > I much prefer the approach taken by the Rails Asset Pipeline/Sprockets > (this and automatic code reloading are the main reasons I prefer Rails over > other alternatives). I think Sprockets directives a much better alternative > to overcome the lack of a require/import statement in JS. RequireJS (and > similar approaches) seems like an unnecessary complication from my point of > view. > > I haven't spent any fair amount of time thinking about alternatives, but > I'm pretty sure a better solution than using AMD exists until we target ES6. > > > I'd love to see some solid integrated JS dependency management tool to > play well with Rails but I'm not sure if this is gonna happen any time soon. > > It's already here, and it's staring you right in the face. > > > I must be blind then as I can't see it ;) > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
