@tmbb: the speed is great, and honestly I’m just building out a webpack branch on a project that I’m working on and have yet to test the speed in comparison. Indeed the docs aren’t great, I haven’t really experienced any flat-out failures though.
Also, maybe it’s just the very plugin-oriented architecture that brunch takes, and just the number of packages available compared to webpack, but I find myself often needing to roll my own plugins, or lean on micro-plugins with no tests available elsewhere in the community to acheive more advanced build tasks.
I’m running a modernizr js builder in my build cycle, and even though I was able to use the preload() hook, I needed the before-brunch plugin to run an npm command out of the box. It seems like it shouldn’t have been so difficult to achieve what seemed like a trivial addition to the overall build cycle.
There were a couple of such instances where I just looked for webpack plugins in edge cases where I happened to be connecting odd tools in the js or css worlds together, and there were in almost all instances multiple plugins available for the same purpose.
If the goal of phoenix is to offer a more complete, robust, easily-maintainable end-to-end platform out of the box, I don’t see how it will be able to stick with brunch long-term, unless the mentality is that the front end is supposed to be a more extensible, hands-on experience for the developer.
Either way, it seems that the two paths are inherently going to be brunch or webpack, and I don’t see a compelling reason to offer default generators for buliding an app with one and not the other.
Additionally, though I think npm is overall a much better build tool than yarn, I could imagine people wanting to use yarn out of the box. Because there isn’t too much documentation on using yarn with webpack with phoenix (indeed there’s only one example app on the web of an end-to-end web app with both Phoenix 1.3 and Webpack 3).
Maybe it’s a seperate project, but it may be worth considering generators for just one or two more of these best-of-breed build tools to make things easier on newcomers, and show them that there are multiple options for front-end management in Phoenix.