Grunt is a relative newcomer to the make scene. It was created by Ben Alman (@cowboy) (https://github.com/cowboy) and released to the world in March 2012 (http://bocoup.com/weblog/introducing-grunt/) and is currently on version v0.4.5. Grunt uses a plugin style architecture, which exports specific paths and variables out to the various plugins, so that they can all work in sync, similar to Node's ecosystem. Its original purpose was to automate the tasks of linting code, running unit tests, concatenating JavaScript files, and minifying those files: basically everything that web developers were doing by hand.
"After a lot of experimentation and failed attempts, I learned that writing and maintaining a suite of "javascript build process" tasks in a gigantic, monolithic Makefile / Jakefile / Cakefile / Rakefile / ?akefile that was shared across all my projects was overwhelming, especially considering how many projects I have. That approach just wasn... |