| It'd all be so much easier if people just stuck to what's already there. If you use NPM (which, if you're doing modern JavaScript, you should be using) you already have a task runner. If you can write shell scripts (whether actual shell scripts or just arbitrary scripts with a hashbang) you can write tasks. What's more, you can combine existing tasks and everything that has a CLI is already a task: http://substack.net/task_automation_with_npm_run Seeing all these grunt-* and gulp-* wrappers makes me sad. Unless your project is very complex, all you need can fit in your package.json (and, maybe, some scripts if you can't find anything that already does what you need it to do). There are some projects that benefit from using dedicated build frameworks like Grunt, Gulp and so on. But the vast majority of projects using them just use them to run one or two tasks that already have a CLI. In those cases it's over-engineering a non-problem. I agree that AngularJS is needlessly complex. It hides a lot of straightforward ideas behind confusing terminology ("this is a service, this is a constructor, but a constructor isn't actually a constructor, it's a function that creates a service, no not that kind of service, that one's just a function called service because reasons"). But I don't think that's representative of all libraries and frameworks. jQuery for example, though ridiculed by many at this point, still exists and is still a go-to solution for conventional web pages. If your "app" is just a bunch of static content, it's probably just a conventional website and jQuery is likely sufficient. It's a good general solution and with some discipline you can even solve moderately complex problems with it. Other projects are not as likely to stick around as long as jQuery has but small and specialised enough that they can be replaced relatively easily (i.e. without a major rewrite of all the code) in the future if necessary. If you just want to build a website, you can probably get away with using jQuery. If you just want to write a node.js web server, you can probably get away with just using express. If you just need utility functions, you can probably get away with underscore. Besides, even if you use hot spanking new technologies, you should still strive to make your code as maintainable as possible given what you have. That niche REST framework you built half the application on may need to be replaced, but if the code is readable and grokkable, maybe at least the guy who has to do it will understand what the application actually does. |
You mean like... make?