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 or yarn 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…

Should I use React or Angular?

To put it in some context: these days recruiters call you whether you know this or that framework. Well not really, really well. But it is just JavaScript. Or ECMAScript (or a flavour of it by Microsoft called TypeScript). But above all it is just a tool to get stuff done. Not every job needs a bulldozer. And besides the bulldozers React and Angular there is Vue.js and plenty more. Choose your tools wisely.