I'll add a second vote for create-react-app; it's a great tool.

It gets a project up-and-running fast and contains basically all you need. It's not a "boilerplate" that dictates which libraries you use (in terms of Redux, Router, HTTP, etc.).

So here's the interesting part: it basically turns your build into a dependency, with all the pros and cons that entails.

CRA is regularly updated so if you choose to, you can keep your project in sync with the latest fads/features in builds -- snapshot testing, minified production build, hot module reloading (coming soon), etc. Of course, like any dependency, there's the risk of breaking changes.

It's a tradeoff, but a pretty good one in my opinion. Having been part of a couple projects that started in Grunt, then moved to Gulp as the Grunt build was getting slower... it's painful to have to retool the build system, basically ever. "Set it and forget it" works great for a few months, but there always seems to be some new trick to make things faster/better/etc that your tool can't do.

I really like the "build as dependency" idea.

Say create-react-app stops being updated / maintained in a year or so, how hard would it be to "untangle" my project from it? With Javascript communities moving so fast, I worry about being left behind, or not being able to update when I need to (or the inverse, not being able to stay on a stable version)

Just one command to decouple your project: "eject"

https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app#conver...

It's funny, but if some of these people griping about web development tried to unpack their favorite enterprise framework, like Spring MVC or whatever J2EE/.NET architecture they are running, there would be way more packages and bundles wrapped up together. It's just the web is finally getting to a good place.

Yeah, difference is between a "standard library" with a million components, and a million independently distributed components. With the usual tradeoffs between centralization and competition.

How do you think you get to a standard library? How do you package the best tools when you don't know what the best tools are?

How long do you think something like that should take? It's already been 25 years... I think it says something about the browser ecosystem and the language itself.

The entire WPF ecosystem for example was developed and refined in a fraction of this period. Heck even .NET itself is only 14 years old.

I don't think that's really a fair comparison. I would argue that you should start counting from the adoption of UMD modules and npm for package management, since a universal package format and dependency management are requisite for an ecosystem to get of the ground.

Languages with one single corporate implementor obviously will centralize and standardize their library. Languages with a bunch of competing implementors stay fragmented. JavaScript is a lot like C++ in this regard.

Javascript development as you see it today started budding with Mootools, Prototype, jQuery, YUI, etc. Wasn't until the early 2000s that the concept of unobtrusive javascript was even a thing. Then bundling assets came, asset pipeline concept from the rails world got popular in javascript land, then you had all the grunt, gulps, webpacks come into the picture -- Point being .NET came out in what, 01? So Javascript has a few more years, I think we will be in a good place in a couple of years. Besides that point, how much work behind the scenes before .NET was even ever released to us was going on? How many man hours of development was put before that first public release? My guess is a lot more than we think.

The "one dependency" quoted is "react-scripts"[0], which just acts as an effective meta-package for auto-including 45 other dependencies.

That said, treehau5 has a point. This shouldn't inherently be an issue in devDependencies, unless there are individual problems. The end product is what's important.

[0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-scripts

Of course it's coming from a place of ignorance - that's where all new devs start, right? This one is perpetuated by the fact that whenever a dev pokes his head into the web dev world, the tools are different than the last time they checked.

Not that I'm not using JavaScript to do things, it was never meant to do, but I don't know, using "modern" or "comprehensible" in same sentence with "JavaScript" always makes me giggle.

There's nothing modern about a website that does nothing without JavaScript