Remove connect-assets, Switch to Sass, Node.js 4.0

[sahat]

Sass

This project used to have Sass stylesheets at some point but I had to revert it back to Less CSS due to io.js breaking node-sass compatibility with every release. Now that Node.js 4.0 is finally out, I think this is less of an issue.

Interestingly enough, according to this blog post (9/9/2015), Sass is currently a preferred choice for the CSS preprocessor.

Connect Assets

This leads us to connect-assets. I understand its usefulness, but it is also painfully slow and significantly affects start-up time for the application. This becomes an issue when you have to wait 3-5 seconds for your app to restart after making any changes. I would prefer to include sass middleware directly and not worry about automatic minification and concatenation of JS files. While you should always try to minify your assets and reduce number of requests for production-running apps, that's not an issue at all for smaller / hackathon projects.

I am opening this GitHub issue so we could discuss the changes proposed above, but if you like the changes then comment below with +1(:+1:).

[drannex42]

👍 Let's do it!

[reesretuta]

👍

[chrisvdb]

• sass: +1
• connect-assets: the increased startup time is somewhat annoying but I would definitely miss the convenience...

[sahat]

Load time with connect-assets

Load time without connect-assets

I would imagine the load time will again go up slightly after I add LESS or Sass stand-alone middleware, but still that's a pretty significant difference.

Update

More or less consistent ~1600ms with the Sass middleware. Around ~1800ms when comping Sass files for the first time.