Swap out Cake for Grunt

[hulufei]

Hi, I just try to swap out cake for grunt

Cake build -> grunt build
Cake watch -> grunt watch

Additionally, I add a lint task(coffeelint) for coffeescript, I do find some lint errors in the source, like mix tab indentation and spaces, maybe we can add some configurations for our code style later, I'm not sure yet.

[adambiggs]

This would be really nice. Especially like the idea of adding coffeelint.

[aeischeid]

Grunt has a lot of hype, but I haven't had time to explore it, so this is an honest question: other than the coffeelint piece what does this achieve or what possibilities does it open up?

[adambiggs]

other than the coffeelint piece what does this achieve or what possibilities does it open up?

Nothing revolutionary, they both do the same thing in the end.

But I think Grunt is a better fit for Spine since Gruntfile is CoffeeScript. It also means we could leverage grunt's really great plugin community (I could see stuff like grunt-contrib-jasmine being useful).

Edit: Got Cake & Rake mixed up 😕... But I still think it'd be a worthwhile change.

[hulufei]

Actually, it seems Grunt will not bring too much to Spine, since Spine is not a web app. I just think it's a little elegant than Cake. And there are some good points, as @adambiggs mentioned: coffeelint, run tests automatically etc.

[adambiggs]

Here's a list of Grunt plugins that look like they might be useful for Spine development:

• grunt-contrib-coffee (already in this PR)
• grunt-coffeelint (already in this PR)
• grunt-contrib-jasmine
• grunt-notify
• grunt-conventional-changelog
• grunt-release

[aeischeid]

@adambiggs and @cengebretson do you guys have any fresh thoughts on this? I can't say I have much of an opinion, so don't want this to get shoot down on account of me

[adambiggs]

I'm bias towards grunt only because I use it every day... It's got a cleaner API and is being adopted by a lot of high-profile projects lately.

Only down side compared with cake is the extra $ npm install grunt-cli -g step needed before any of the local grunt tasks will work.

[aeischeid]

I guess from the look of it it isn't like we really have to throw out the cake stuff that we have. so this wouldn't necessarily have to be a swap? I mean if we are just adding grunt for those who want it then I guess I see no problem with that

[adambiggs]

You're right, but I think we should go with one or the other personally. Having two build tools with overlapping build scripts feels kind of messy IMHO...

[cengebretson]

I think we should probably pick one and go with it. Spine seems like such a simple project, I think either cake or grunt will be fine. If grunt is becoming the standard for javascript projects and more people are using that might as well make the switch to that. But beyond just watch/compiling coffee script and running tests, not sure what else spine would need? Though the changelog plugin might be useful...

[adamrights]

Grunt does seem to becoming more standard. It also works nicely with bower and the yeoman generators.

[adambiggs]

@aeischeid @cengebretson It's been a while since we looked at this, but I wanted to see if you'd be ok with merging it.

I'm using it locally and added a test runner server with grunt-contrib-connect to make debugging unit tests easier in the browser.

If everybody's happy with it, I can handle the merge conflicts.

[aeischeid]

shoot, just in time now that gulp is the new hot thing ;)
I guess I am fine with that. the only thing I would add is that then we should update these docs on how to use it.

[adambiggs]

I've been wanting an excuse to try gulp! Might give it a try first before merging this :)

[cengebretson]

I think for a small project like spine either one will probably work out just fine. I will say from taking a quick look at gulp it really seems to make sense, I like the pipe/stream idea behind it.

[ghost]

+1 for merging grunt. It's got a giant mindshare online, and is has many widely used plugins. Gulp may be better for some instances (I haven't used it), but it is pretty new and not well known.

However, IMO it's almost more important to have only one build system in place. Having more than one just seems ripe for weird bugs, duplicated effort, conflicting lints, etc. Especially since these are relatively easy to get running, whichever one is chosen.

[richard-flosi]

Could gulp with browserify replace hem?

[reco]

+1 gulp

[jamiter]

I'm also using gulp right now for a spine project (instead of Hem to be precise). Very happy with gulp. My brain just likes the simple files in -> transform/check/whatever -> files out with a lot of flexibility.

In short: +1 for gulp

[reco]

Sweet. Did you manage to make spine globally available with gulp? What hem does with the setup.coffee?

[jamiter]

This is a gulpfile to replace Hem:

https://gist.github.com/jamiter/fff2081c3cdcf62ce316

It also adds live reload (which is awesome).

I did not add support for .eco/.jeco, because those do not seem to be developed anymore.

[sebastiannm]

@jamiter Hi, the "require()" is not finding modules if requiring from the index.html.
Did you had that problem too?

[jamiter]

In the index page we had to add jquery first:

var jQuery  = require("jquery");
var $ = jQuery;
var exports = this;

I added an example index.jade to the gist. It's a bit off topic here so please continue any discussion about the gulpfile in the gist.

[reco]

hi there, in case somebody is interested we build quite a solid setup where we use gulp instead of hem

https://github.com/Nex9/imago.theme.spine

[adambiggs]

Really cool stuff!

@aeischeid @cengebretson @maccman How would you feel about switching to Gulp, then incorporating something like @jamiter & @reco's examples directly into the main Spine project?

[aeischeid]

was just looking into the cake file for running tests in the jasmine2 branch. I would be fine with moving to gulp over in that branch. @adambiggs does that seem like a good branch to get it in on?

[adambiggs]

Sounds good to me. Seems like that branch is almost ready to merge anyway right?

[aeischeid]

yes, nearly.

[jamiter]

Hey guys, could this PR be closed? It still shows up in my "mentioned PRs" list. Doesn't seem that this will ever happen after 4 years... Thanks.