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Gulp has a lot in common with the venerable make(1) in its approach to building targets, but make is seemingly overlooked in certain circles. It's definitely wo
by jdp 13y ago
Gulp has a lot in common with the venerable make(1) in its approach to building targets, but make is seemingly overlooked in certain circles. It's definitely worth checking out. I wrote something of an introduction to make with the setting of managing a JS app's codebase:
http://justinpoliey.com/articles/make-for-front-end-development.html http://justinpoliey.com/articles/make-for-front-end-developm...
Make is old, but still pretty relevant. Maybe some peoples' avoidances come from the association with autotools and the complexities involved in building portable C programs. Using make to manage something like a front-end codebase, which doesn't suffer that family of complexity, is pretty straightforward and kinda enjoyable.
- jvilk 13y agoI used make for a long time on my JS codebases, and I agree that it is very useful. You can do a lot without needing to write a lot, and file targets usually 'make sense' for most build tasks. I decided to switch to Grunt, though, to enable Windows developers to build my projects. This decision stems from the fact that Node does not run in Cygwin in Windows, so we weren't getting Windows build support 'for free'. The Grunt build files are much much more verbose, but I know that they work cross-platform as I no longer rely on CLI tools that may not be present, or may have different flags between the BSD and GNU variants. If you don't care about Windows developer support, though, make is definitely worth investigating.
- numbsafari 13y agoCurious... if you have to support windows developers who are okay with Cygwin, why not use VirtualBox with Vagrant to achieve the same thing without the "doesn't work with cygwin" problem?
- jvilk 13y agoVisual Studio has really nice TypeScript support. :) Also, I never said the Windows developers were 'okay' with Cygwin... just that it wouldn't solve the problem. ;)
- Touche 13y agoWith make you wind up having separate makefiles for each platform. For cross-platform by default environments like Node, that doesn't make sense.