In a little over a week and a half, I’ll be presenting this session at Gradle Summit in Santa Clara
Single Page JavaScript Webapps … A Gradle Story
Most people ask me why we chose to use Gradle over a JavaScript build tool. It was a small circumstance that we took this path. Usually most companies begin their new JS project with Grunt or Gulp. We tried the same path but it was an unfortunate case at the clients site, their firewall that prevented us from using npm to download npm modules. We tried to get around this but since we already were using Gradle and it could get around the firewall, we put it through its paces.
In addition, the pace of JS build tool momentum is a little ridiculous. Every time I visit a JS meetup there is a new tool on the scene for managing builds. I’m not sure where to invest my time in learning a tool if the flavour of the month changes so regularly.
Many Java projects have picked up Gradle. There is low configuration required to get a build up, but you are allowed to declare more as required to customise the build for your world. Since many JVM devs are learning Gradle, and have migrated some of their projects to the new build tool, the barrier for a Java dev to use this tool to build projects on other platforms like JavaScript isn’t too hard.
In this talk we’ll cover getting a simple build up for a simple single page JavaScript web app covering the functions that are available in Gradle for processing JavaScript & CSS resources. We’ll look at some cool features you can get by integrating Jetty so that developers can checkout and run the project in an interactive way. Other tricks and tips covered whilst developing our project will be covered. Finally, grunt and gulp are the two main contenders in the JS build space. We’ll provide a quick overview of how they work and where you’d want to bring these into your build.
If you are in the area and can come to gradle summit, please come along to watch!