static-pug-boilerpalte VS gulp

If you're at all interested, I have a boilerplate repo here that includes features like generating svg spritesheets from an icon directory, image minification, and many other little nice additions to speed up the process. I need to get around to updating the readme which is a bit dated but you can probably get a fair idea of what's going on by just taking a look at it, especially if you're at all familiar with gulp.

I have used webpack before on React projects in the past, but rarely do I ever deep-dive into it and fully understand what is going on under the hood, so I decided I'd try my hand updating my boilerplate to leverage Webpack, but am a bit confused on going about doing it.

No, you're right about using @use and @forward rather than @import. These days I generally work with CSS in JS using something like styled-components, but when I do work on static sites, I funnily enough do use a rather nice gulp build I've put together over the years, that leverages browserstack and pug, so @import works for me... but I should really update my boilerplate.

A little gulp and npm knowledge is beneficial, but not required

Many web pages use CSS and JavaScript files to handle various features and styles. Each file, however, requires a separate HTTP request, which can slow down page loading. Concatenation comes into play here. It involves combining multiple CSS or JavaScript files into a single file. As a result, pages load faster, reducing the time spent requesting individual files. Gulp, Grunt, and Webpack are some of the tools that can assist you in speeding up the concatenation process. They enable seamless merging of many files during development, ensuring deployment readiness.

Once you build a simple Vite backend integration, try not to complicate Vite's configuration unless you absolutely must. Vite has become one of the most popular bundlers in the frontend space, but it wasn't the first and it certainly won't be the last. In my 7 years of building for the web, I've used Grunt, Gulp, Webpack, esbuild, and Parcel. Snowpack and Rome came-and-went before I ever had a chance to try them. Bun is vying for the spot of The New Hotness in bundling, Rome has been forked into Biome, and Vercel is building a Rust-based Webpack alternative.

NPM packages include a wide range of tools such as frameworks like Express or React, libraries like jQuery, and task runners such as Gulp, and Webpack.

Another way to optimize is by reducing the size of CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files by removing comments, unnecessary spaces, and line breaks. Combine CSS and JavaScript files into a single file to reduce the number of server requests. This can be done using build tools like Webpack or Gulp.

Gulp - the streaming build system

Browserify was great at bundling scripts, but what if we need to transform code - Say compile CoffeeScript to JavaScript, for this, a new group of tools for the web was born, which focussed on running code transforms. These are usually called task runners, and the most popular ones are Grunt and Gulp.

What we see, a decade ago, are that many of the "popular" libraries, frameworks, and methods, not surprisingly, have gone by the wayside, a lot that have remained in current code as difficult-to-removemodernize legacy cruft (Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Backbone, Angular 1, ...), and then we have the small minority that are still here. Some that remain have had their utility lessened/questioned by platform and language improvements (jQuery, lodash, ...), but very, very few exist that are the same now as they were then. Another fun historical reference: issue #118 of "JavaScript Weekly" (February 22, 2013) includes a first link out to asm.js.

Reminds me of gulp

GULP: Gulp is basically a task automation tool. The file that you create in this tool, is a plain JavaScript file that you can run to automate you menial tasks. It comes under the category of package manager. Gulp is very developer friendly and easy to learn. For more info: https://gulpjs.com/