web-app

If you want to check out an alternative for building applications, go look up Webpack. I strongly believe you can build web applications without having to pull in Gulp or Grunt. And to back up my claim I setup a project [0] that shows how to do it using webpack + npm run-scripts. I'd argue it solves a large set of problems while maintaining a reasonable level of complexity. [0] https://github.com/cesarandreu/web-app

I made a scaffold [0] that tries to give you a reasonable starting point, without tons of extra cruft. It was important to me that the scaffold handle all 3 basic environments: development, testing, and production. It's basically a single webpack config (that's heavily commented, btw!) and a set of npm run-scripts. You don't need gulp to build an application! And I would not call bower a sane way to include frontend dependencies... Not by a long shot. [0] https://github.com/cesarandreu/web-app

I challenge your assumption that gulp + browserify is more straightforward than webpack. Your setup is not representative of a real application. I setup a project scaffold [0] with a configuration that supports development, production, and testing environments. It has a heavily commented webpack config. No tests? No asset cache busting by updating name references? Come on, those are basic requirements for a web project. On top of that, webpack lets your dependencies be resolved as part of your code, instead of relying on certain files being in certain folders: e.g. your css and images. [0] http://github.com/cesarandreu/web-app