JS Build tool of my dreams

readme.md

Features desired

(but not necessarily found elsewhere)

Must Have

1. Native Sourcemap support: JavaScript and CSS often need these for debugging purposses. Managing this manually tends to be a complete PITA. Also we want a way to globally turn these off, if we need better build time (see next).
2. Native Watch & Serve: Setting up a dev environment should be straightforward, as the build tool should support mutliple environments, but also the abbility to watch source files and serve them from itself.
3. Lazy: Shouldn't rebuild stuff if it doesn't need to.
4. Native concurrency: Detect dependencies and parallelize automatically.
5. Good error reporting: Build tools tend to suck in telling you what went wrong.

Nice to have

5. Code over configuration: No more 1000LOC+ JSON files please!
6. (optional) Opaque file management: I want to specify what files I want in my destination directory, but I don't want to manage intermediary files.
7. Support for test-type tasks: Tests need to give users reasonable output, but want to run as fast as possible.
8. Easy API, so plugins and whatnot can happen.
9. Native Live-Reload: At least for styles.

Prior art

• make: is lazy
• grunt: ok API, best JS ecosystem
• gulp: is fast, native concurrency (to an extent)
• brocolli: has opaque filesystem, is somewhat lazy

Note to self: http://cr.yp.to/redo.html

Some thoughts from setting up Gulp for SS:

• SASS:
  • node-sass, based on libsass is really fast but does not support embedded sourcemaps
  • the ruby based sass is slow and always gave us trouble on different machines
  • no simple way to manage the lazy building because dependencies are handled by SASS...
• JS:
  • sourcemaps work pretty well with Gulp, as long as each plugin supports it and so far they all do.
  • ordering the files before combining them is a bit of a pain because for example you need to declare an angular module before you can add controllers and stuff to it. At the same time I liked that I could do that myself instead of the tool forcing its way on me.
• Livereload: the one we use in SS seems to work but it's a bit wonky, could just be me not fully grasping Gulp stuff though...

I think my biggest pain is Bower frankly. If someone could fix/replace bower but still use the bower.json files then that would be awesome.

Ok one more thing: Gulp errors have reached the pinnacle of uselessness

OK, made a new version incorporating some of the feedback, and also indicating what features I consider essential for this project to have value and what I consider features that would make life easier, but aren't necessarily all that essential.