For JavaScript-cen­tric projects that use React or Vue for JAM­stack-style web­sites, you’ll inevitably want to use web­pack, because of all of the scaf­fold­ing that exists around it, and advanced fea­tures like code split­ting, hot mod­ule reload­ing, etc. But for web­pack to be used effec­tive­ly, it real­ly needs to be embraced whole-hog and used not just as a mod­ule bundler, but as a mod­ule loader as well.



There’s also an old­er fron­tend work­flow automa­tion tool called Grunt, and it works fine, but it can be some­what more ver­bose to con­fig­ure. It’s also in gen­er­al slow­er than Gulp for build­ing things, due to its file-ori­ent­ed approach.

There’s even Lar­avel Mix, which adds a lay­er on top of web­pack. I’ve found that it’s fan­tas­tic for boot­strap­ping projects, but when­ev­er the project grows to any scale, its been nec­es­sary to have more con­trol over the build process.

Viget has built a tool called Blendid! that uses a hybrid approach of uti­liz­ing both Gulp and web­pack, and it looks pret­ty well done. But sim­i­lar to Lar­avel Mix, I pre­fer a bit more con­trol over the build process when necessary.

At some point, the lay­ers upon lay­ers ends up get­ting a bit sil­ly as well.

In the end, all of these tools (Gulp includ­ed) sim­ply exe­cute Node.js JavaScript pack­ages on the com­mand line. Gulp just adds an API and stream­ing lay­er on top that makes doing typ­i­cal fron­tend builds easier.



You could also just use npm scripts to exe­cute the var­i­ous Node.js mod­ules direct­ly, but I find the con­ve­nience lay­er that Gulp pro­vides to be worth the trade­off of anoth­er lev­el of dependency.

There is even a GUI tool called CodeK­it that offers some nice func­tion­al­i­ty, but I think ulti­mate­ly it will end up being the DreamWeaver of the fron­tend automa­tion tool world. Some things sim­ply can’t be expressed as effi­cient­ly via a GUI, and there’s lit­tle chance it will be able to keep pace with the Node.js ecosystem.