Sass and registerCSS?

dev
1

Has anyone thought about how to integrate sass into farcry?

Just thought I’s put it out there.

Cheers
Phil

2

I have looked into it, and even produced a very hacky proof of concept.
Unfortunately, the ideal way to do it is probably to hook into the CSS and
JS minification in FarCry which isn’t currently extendible. That whole area
of FarCry is due for an overhaul, but we don’t have specific plans.

In the meantime you could do your own compilation in
_onServerSpecificVarsAfterInit.cfm.

Blair

3

Did you use a libSass wrapper? I’ve had a look around hoping there might be a java library but can only find a Maven plugin.

Phil

4

We rationalised not adding SASS/SCSS/LESS etc support to FarCry Core in a few ways:

  1. Supporting SASS/SCSS/LESS is a reasonable amount of work which would need to be maintained over time
  2. In the future there could be even more ways to create dynamic CSS, or the CSS spec itself could implement some of the things that these alternatives do (it already has in some ways)
  3. There are many good tools for turning SASS/SCSS/LESS into CSS, including minification, and dedicated tools generally do specific jobs best
  4. Most front-end development takes place “before” the code ever makes it into a FarCry app, so we need to have a build tool for front end resources that doesn’t depend on an existing/working FarCry application
  5. Dynamically building and compiling assets during application startup makes the startup process slower

For these reasons, it’s much better to externalise that build process and have it independent of the backend that you are writing your app with.

Most of our projects use Grunt and NodeJS plugins for handling this stuff, but you could choose whatever works best for you.

5

Hi Justin,
Thanks for your well thought out and extensive response. Yes it’s good to draw a line in the sand and I’ve taken your points on board. I can see parallels with the cfml community with regard to front end tags.
I’ll go the grunt way and see how I go. I’m really just gearing up for the release of bootstrap 4 which has decided to go the sass way forward. Sass looks like the sensible option and it was only a matter of time that I was forced to take the plunge. (I’m sick of find and replace on large CSS files :slight_smile: ).