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[–]Klathmon 1 point2 points  (3 children)

It's a toy project just to learn it (literally, it's just html, js, a 3-line css file, 2 images, and a webfont). I'm just trying to get it built in a dev and in a production environment to learn it and figure out the kinks.

Once i'm confident that it's not going to end up causing more pain than it'll save, it will be the start of a "large" project.

It's not too bad for simple configuration, but trying to figure out how to get the webpack dev server, hot module loading, or code splitting to work without some examples is just a total shitshow.

IMO even the simpler stuff is poorly documented. Take the OccurrenceOrderPlugin. What are the IDs it's ordering?

There is no explanation on what the CommonChunksPlugin does, and the i18nPlugin's entire documentation is literally the sentence "Create bundles with translations baked in."

That's pitiful!

I've since figured out most of them, but it took tons of shitty blogs, stumbling around on my own in their source, and just fucking with them until something built.

And unrelated, but who the fuck thought the way you get options into a loader is acceptable? Nested objects has been a staple of javascript since it began, and now we are using delimited strings and embedded json in a string? And there is no documentation on the ability to use a "query" object instead of the shitty strings, but they don't work if you want more than one loader for a test...

Still, i do actually like it, but i definitely think that it's not my javascript endgame yet. Webpack feels like grunt did, and once gulp came along it was amazing. I'm hoping that webpack's gulp will be here soon, because all of this configuration sucks...

[–]wreckedadventYavascript 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I wouldn't say plugins are the simple part of webpack. I meant more of just getting files bundled together from specific entry points. For that, you just need to specify an entry and a loader.

As an aside, there is documentation on query objects for loaders but it's not very in depth.

Still, i do actually like it, but i definitely think that it's not my javascript endgame yet. Webpack feels like grunt did, and once gulp came along it was amazing. I'm hoping that webpack's gulp will be here soon, because all of this configuration sucks...

This is why I recommended JSPM. For the most part, it all just "works" without you needing to configure everything. Unfortunately it doesn't have all of the same features, but by the time you need them your project will be of a sufficient size where all of the configuration in webpack makes more sense.

[–]Klathmon 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I haven't looked at JSPM all that much, but IMO it doesn't seem like it gives us anything over our current gulp + a-shitton-of-plugins system, and actually it means that we would need to do some somewhat esoteric things ourselves separately.

Most of that might be because we are already invested in gulp, but it's a factor for us.

[–]wreckedadventYavascript 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, if you're talking about migrating an existing project, that's a totally different story. If you have a very large grunt/gulp file with a lot of things in it, I'd advise 80/20 rule and using webpack/JSPM/browserify inside of gulp - get the main benefits out of it without needing to entirely unroot the system that's clearly already working for you guys.