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Gulp is really great and better, than Grunt, but sometimes make seems to be a good choice that people forget about.
Anything extra was very easily managed by some simple Makefiles.
Very useful. This will be required reading for all our students :) I created a react/grunt/browserify/babelify (+bootstrap) starter repo to clone from github for them but think it's still confusing. This provides much needed background information in one bundled place (even though the stack is slightly different and only mentions grunt).
That repo sounds like a good candidate for replacement with a Yeoman generator!
The more practical solution would indeed be yeoman (imo)
Gulp is really great and better, than Grunt, but sometimes make seems to be a good choice that people forget about.
I'd rather use JS than add shell mixed in with Makefile. Two extra languages just to run a build system seems like adding unnecessary complexity.
I think it's good to note that you don't actually need a single one of these tools to make functioning software. You can pack your scripts with cat and download libraries with wget and use regular old JavaScript without transpilers. When you have a problem with this, you can use tools... But you don't have to top-load every project with a whole suite of complex tools just for the sake of it.
I think it's good to note that you don't actually need a single one of these tools to make functioning software. You can pack your scripts with cat and download libraries with wget and use regular old JavaScript without transpilers. When you have a problem with this, you can use tools... But you don't have to top-load every project with a whole suite of complex tools just for the sake of it.
Well, you do at minimum need something that understands CommonJS modules, if you want to pack isomorphic code to run in the browser, so you need Browserify or Webpack. And you need a module downloader that resolves and installs dependencies, so you need NPM and/or Bower. And, if you want to write unit tests (which you should!) then you need a Javascript test harness, because otherwise you're going to have a bad time…
No, you don't. These are optional. You only need these for larger applications that need packing.
> And you need a module downloader that resolves and installs dependencies, so you need NPM and/or Bower.
No, you don't. You can manually keep things up to date.
> And, if you want to write unit tests (which you should!) then you need a Javascript test harness, because otherwise you're going to have a bad time instantiating your modules and injecting mocks into them.
Okay, you probably do need this.
Gulp is really great and better, than Grunt, but sometimes make seems to be a good choice that people forget about.
Some of my Make build systems have gotten a bit unwieldy so recently I have been looking at using Ninja and ninja-build-gen from npm. This way I can still write my configure and my build tasks in JS/CoffeeScript and get to use a modern less cluttered version of Make that will scale well with the project.
We talk about "modern JavaScript tooling" but year after year, the list essentially stays the same. Maybe few new players have appeared (Gulp, WebPack, Babeljs) but they do exactly the same thing that the tools we had before (e.g. Grunt, Browserify, Traceur). It occurs to me that "modern JavaScript tooling" is growing only vertically (better tools to build, better tools to modularize, better tools to transpilation),…
Editors? How about an IDE.
In the java environment I can manage an application container, profiler, debugger, compiler, packager, test suite all from one application.
Also included: near-omniscient auto-complete, hot-code replace, incremental building, dependency fetching, visual version control, automatic refactoring, deployment and many other conveniences I'm taking for granted. Hell, I could even file tickets from my IDE if I wanted to.
Gulp is really great and better, than Grunt, but sometimes make seems to be a good choice that people forget about.
since i switched to webpack, i've had very little reason to use gulp in my projects. Anything extra was very easily managed by some simple Makefiles.
It didn't just eliminate the use of gulp for much things, but also minimized the boilerplate I needed to get this stuff done in gulp.
Everything is just a "loader" away and doesn't need much configuration.
I even got rid of Bower for most libraries.
With NPM and Webpack you can get pretty far. With all it's plugins an loaders you're pretty much set.
I think it's good to note that you don't actually need a single one of these tools to make functioning software. You can pack your scripts with cat and download libraries with wget and use regular old JavaScript without transpilers. When you have a problem with this, you can use tools... But you don't have to top-load every project with a whole suite of complex tools just for the sake of it.
No one needs anything. You can write code in notepad. No one wants that, and no one wants to have a million globals on the browser or hit F5 every single save any more. While there is a learning curve to something like gulp, you really only need to set it up once and you can use it on every project as simply as typing "npm i".