I've worked extensively with both grunt and gulp for the past couple of years (I've even written gulp plugins![1][2]), and I'm still shocked at how bad the tooling is compared to ruby (rails asset pipeline / sprockets) and clojure (leiningen, chestnut, etc.).
For example, here is a simple gulpfile for a livereload environment that compiles sass and coffeescript [3]. It's over 500 lines long, and it requires extensive knowledge of at least 20 plugins. And half of those plugins are there to address the shortcomings of other plugins, or of gulp itself [4].
But really the worst part is that every time some dependency of a dependency pushes a point release, it breaks the entire build. My team has resorted to passing around a stable `node_modules` dropbox folder. I'm literally terrified to run npm update!
Anyway boot looks cool, I can't wait to try it out :)
Have you taken a look at broccoli[1]? We ran across it after going the Fileset route, but were refreshed to see that it also does a kind of Fileset thing (they call them "trees")[2]. I don't know much more about it other than that it's what's underneath ember-cli, and the Ember people do a lot of good work in tools realm. Anyway, it could be a way for you to realize some of the niceties of the boot approach over in JS-land.
Have you taken a look at broccoli[1]? We ran across it after going the Fileset route, but were refreshed to see that it also does a kind of Fileset thing (they call them "trees")[2]. I don't know much more about it other than that it's what's underneath ember-cli, and the Ember people do a lot of good work in tools realm. Anyway, it could be a way for you to realize some of the niceties of the boot approach over in JS-land.
1. https://github.com/broccolijs/broccoli
2. http://www.solitr.com/blog/2014/02/broccoli-first-release/