Laravel 4 is certainly out of beta now and still continues to be one of the best php frameworks. One thing sorely missing is an asset pipeline. A few attempts have been made to remedy this but none have fit the bill. Here were a few should be’s on my mind when developing this…
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Asset pipeline should be php friendly. Not everyone wants to go download npm, grunt, rails gems, less compilers, coffescript compilers etc. So by using Assetic and composer packages, I have tried to keep it all in house php and no need for external libraries or languages.
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Asset pipeline should be super simple. One should be able to install and run with it - convention over configuration man. If you have to spend over 10 minutes with putting the asset pipeline to work, then I’ve done something wrong. Contact me.
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Asset pipeline should be testable and tested. Tested code means happier code.
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Asset pipeline should be fun. Let’s face it, if everything works smoothly and you just drag and drop in stuff and go about your way, you’ll be a much happier developer.
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Asset pipeline should be transparent. An example of this in practice is the fact that you can drop in your fonts and images into the app/assets folder (which is outside of public) and still reference those files. You don’t have to think to hard about… “which files do I want to be in my public/ folder and in my app/assets folder?”
Here are a couple of videos for your pleasure, amigos.
Introduction video to Asset Pipeline
{% youtube 1iDB5BFsTw8 %}
Creating a Handlerbars package
{% youtube IPgUUYb7SqU %}