I am somewhat fresh to Phalcon. Just had my first PR merged today \o/ but I have an idea for a way to manage assets without needing gulp or grunt.
I come from Ruby on Rails and there is a strong idiom of the AssetPipeline via Sprockets. I don't think on average we need that much power up front but I built up a prototype of an AssetManifest Loader that uses on the built in asset manager stuff to abstract the assets per collection be defining a something.manifest file with an app/assets/js/.
https://github.com/ninjapanzer/phalcon_php_fullcalendar/pull/1
For reference here is the walk through:
We define the assetManifest service https://github.com/ninjapanzer/phalcon_php_fullcalendar/blob/5ff9865c558f97be721e53df470e46f01c7d3d0a/public/index.php#L65-L74
Specify Manifests: https://github.com/ninjapanzer/phalcon_php_fullcalendar/blob/5ff9865c558f97be721e53df470e46f01c7d3d0a/app/assets/js/application.manifest
Output css and js based upon a combination of the type and manifest filename: https://github.com/ninjapanzer/phalcon_php_fullcalendar/blob/5ff9865c558f97be721e53df470e46f01c7d3d0a/app/views/layouts/index.volt
The loader itself is pretty direct but could learn to be smart enough to handle different compliation strategies and DI injectable preprocessors https://github.com/ninjapanzer/phalcon_php_fullcalendar/blob/5ff9865c558f97be721e53df470e46f01c7d3d0a/app/assets/ApplicationManifest.php
Of course at this point I would rather use the FFI if Zephir has it to directly access the precompiled version of most of these like libsass and such.
