In my web development automation series we will learn the basics of automating your JavaScript and CSS development. The goal of automation is to perform regular that I would otherwise be doing manually. This series assumes that you are already familiar with CoffeeScript and LESS.
- We will first look at how I historically built my JavaScript and CSS using Apache Ant
- Then, we will work on installing and configuring Grunt
- Lastly, we will build our GruntFile using CoffeeScript and add the watch plugin to run our automation in the background
Grunt is a great tool for a web developer, especially one who tends to love JavaScript and JSON over XML. Prior to using Grunt, I would employ a tool such as an Apache Ant build.xml file to minify and combine my JavaScript and CSS stylesheets. In this post I am going to look at the past and how I used Apache Ant, but more importantly, I will dive into how I use Grunt to build my CoffeeScript and LESS sources into my final JS and CSS files. To top it all off, we will actually code the Gruntfile using CoffeeScript.