It appears to me that everyone is using webpack over gulp and grunt when working on a React app. Is there a specific reason why?
I've been working with gulp for some time now and I'm willing to learn React and I don't want to learn webpack if it's the same thing as gulp.
Webpack is primarily a bundler, but in the process of bundling it ends up doing a lot of the same tasks that Gulp has been used to do, like compiling, preprocessing, and minimizing. One nice thing about Webpack is that many of those tasks are baked in; there's no need to write Gulp tasks from scratch.
Webpack has some other cool features like, chunking, which breaks out code shared by modules into a separate bundle; live refresh with webpack-dev-server where the web page will refresh automatically when a change is saved; and, for React in particular, hot module replacement, which can swap in new modules to the page without a need for a release.
The two are not mutually exclusive. I still include Gulp in many of my projects for tasks that would require writing a custom loader or plugin under Webpack.
Webpack is meant to be a Module bundler while Gulp to be a task runner.
However, as bundling can be done by Gulp / Grunt as a task.
Webpack is popular as it comes default with React as System JS comes with Angular.
Ben Buchanan (200ok)
I make some bits of the web.
I suspect it's largely because webpack is used by default in create-react-app (and many popular tools) and that's how most devs get started.