Is there a reason why we don’t have gulp or grunt integrated for our builds? I am currently in the process of writing it up and using gulp. I am currently merging the GCI contributions and needed to change the less file, but there isn’t an automated build process…I could use the Makefile, but I’d rather not. In addition, we could probably just use gulp or grunt to run our tests…and get rid of that Makefile altogether…
Opinions? Going to go forward with this plan unless somebody objects.
@elliott has used grunt with Modulus/Modulus-UI.
Are these tools an alternative to Maven ? Our ecosystem is mostly Java, it seems more natural to use Maven.
In addition to what @lluismf said, I would say we should actively avoid another runtime environment like Node. I see lots of benefits of node and the growing toolset like bower, grunt etc for web programming. But then having new devs install another runtime environment besides Java is increasing the learning curve.
This is the ID Dashboard which is Node.JS, not Java – I don’t think we should introduce java into the mix. That said…I’ll put Grunt in…and halt work on Gulp.
We are already using Node – I am talking about the ID Dashboard which is already using Node.JS.
I didn’t read the source close enough – we could probably speed things up by building the CSS files before deploying…and eliminate less-middleware entirely…anyone opposed? I’m leaning towards gulp…it seems a bit less verbose.
Automating tools are certainly useful, however, it’s not really necessary for now. But we can adopt one for sure, gulp and grunt seem to be popular in Node circle.
As the less-middleware, from the documentation, we can certainly use the once option to eliminate the compiling consumption in production.
I should also mention I plan on switching to sass soon but there’s sass-middlware…after GSoC likely – or probably before. I’m on a time-crunch to merge the GCI contributions ASAP so I can switch to sass before coding begins. There’s no learning curve. So maybe gulp isn’t useful – It might be useful to minify our JS though and combine it into one file.