Clean Up Repo Commit Process + Make a Crossplatform Build Script

[Skylion007]

Currently, when you submit a change to the repository, you must first modify the individual source files, then run the build script, then copy the newly built script to the www folder. This is terribly inefficient and each change can become 23MB or more! We are also in desperate need of defining a style guide and documentation for committing to the repository.

[zaerl]

I can help the maintainers with this problem. I think that you should use one of the popular building tools like gulp, grunt or whatever and npm for managing all the dependencies. The www folder IMHO can be moved to a separated branch.

[Skylion007]

I definitely agree that www should be moved to a separate branch, although probably not to "gh-pages" since I think we still wish to use Brown University as our webhost.

I don't have a lot of experience with JS build systems so I am not sure whether Gulp or Grunt would work better for this project, but anything would be better than the SH build script we currently employ. We also have another issue for wrapping this project as an NPM module, so also feel free to help out with that as well.

I think we can take care of moving the www to a demo branch, if you wish to work on getting a build system setup.

Update: It looks like Gulp might be the best solution from what I am reading. Also feel free to give a shot at issue #26.

[zaerl]

Nowadays gulp is by far the most used task runner and it's an excellent choice. I can enclose the project on an NPM module but you have to register it on npm central repository.

[Skylion007]

We'd be glad to register the module on the NPM central repository.

[alexpapster]

www contents were moved to a new branch (www)

[jeffhuang]

That's a little unusual in using branches as a separate storage for www files. I think it's more common to put it in a separate repository.

[alexpapster]

If you'd like to you can create under brownhci a separate repository and we can put it there. I don't mind as long as www doesn't come with the master branch of webgazer.

[jeffhuang]

Doesn't matter to me that much. What do you want to do?

[alexpapster]

I prefer it as it is, it's very fast and easy to manage, although not very conventional. Unless anyone has an alternative suggestion let's leave as it is, at least for now.

[Skylion007]

@zaerl I found a Grunt file that I modified to suit our build needs for now, a Gulp build system might be better down the line but for just concatenation and uglification, this seemed the easiest. Still open to a Gulp build system to complement the Grunt one.

[jeffhuang]

think this one can be considered resolved