JavaScript & Rails: a `webpacker` evaluation

Webpacker is still opt-in for new Rails projects. But this might change. The JavaScript ecosystem is moving fast and new JavaScript frameworks are pushing customer’s expectations to higher levels. To use these frameworks with your Rails app, you had a few options:
- Include the JavaScript manually; which requires you to manually copy the files in place
- Use a gem-wrapper to to install the JavaScript library; but this required quite some maintenance on the Gem-author’s side.
- Try to mangle
npm
oryarn
into the asset pipeline yourself - Use Rails Assets (an automagic Gem-wrapper)
A small praise for Rails Assets
I have been using rails-assets.org the past few years to keep my JavaScript dependencies up to date. It thought it was smart solution; instead of requiring individual developers to maintain Gem-wrappers, Gem wrappers are created on the fly by RailsAssets.org. It was smart and light weight on the developers side and worked perfectly with the Rails' Asset p…