Use CommonJS modules in Rails with Browserify

Hello,

Javascript and Front-end in general are becoming more and more complex. In my opinion, the standard delivery of Rails does not meet the modern needs of the Front-end developer. In addition, the use of Sprockets makes your code very Rails-specific, which makes it difficult for it to be newer developers unfamiliar with Rails.

In this video, using the simple React.js application as an example, I will show how you can migrate from Sprockets to Browserify.

This approach gives the following bonuses:

• Javascript dependency management for packages via npm;
• Best Tulling and IDE integration;
• Reducing the connectivity of the frontend and backend;
• The ability to select frontend in a separate application and repository. That may not be a bonus at first glance, but it is quite convenient when you are working with a large team on a large application.

Application code is available on github: https://github.com/nLight/tutorial-rails-react-browserify