A while back I wrote a couple of blog posts about how to set up a “front-end build pipeline” using Gulp. The pipeline handled things like less to css conversion, bundling and minification, TypeScript to JavaScript transpile etc. However, this pipeline built on the idea that you would have Gulp watching your files as you worked, and doing the work as they changed. The problem with this is that it only runs on the development machine, and not the buildserver.… I nicely avoided this topic by ending my second post with “But that is a topic for the next post”. I guess it is time for that next post…
So let’s start by looking at the application I will be using for this example!
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10. November 2014
ZeroKoll
ASP.NET , Web
In the previous post, we looked at how we can use Gulp to run tasks for us. And in that post we used it to create tasks for transpiling LESS and TypeScript into CSS and JavaScript. But the example was very small and simple. It only contained 1 LESS file and 1 JavaScript file. But what if we have more than 1? Well, that’s when we need to start bundling the files together, and potentially minify them so that they are faster to download. Luckily, this is a piece of cake to do using Gulp. So in this post, we will have a look at how to do that, as well as how to get some TypeScript/JavaScript tests thrown in there as well.
Dislaimer: The solution will still be VERY small and simple. But at least it will be made big enough to be able to use bundling and minification. Which to be honest just means that we need more than one file of each type…
I assume that you have read the last post, and that if you are following along on your machine, you will need to be done with everything that was done in that post…
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4. November 2014
ZeroKoll
ASP.NET , Web
I started building web-based software professionally around year 2000, just before the big IT crash in Sweden. It started out being just hacing together HTML, mostly using tables, and a little JavaScript. But slowly evolved into building ASP applications with VB Script and COM-components in VB. Since then, I have been in and out of the webdevelopment scene a whole bunch of times, and very little has changed. It is still HTML/CSS/JavaScript over HTTP…
Yes, on server-side there have been some changes. First an abstraction into WebForms, and then back to MVC. And to me, ASP.NET MVC is pretty similar to classical ASP in many ways. But the front end has pretty much stayed the same. It is still good ol’ HTML and JavaScript…and CSS of course. However, having been away from it for a little while now, coming back I realize that the scene has changed. A lot… Yes, the languages are unfortunately the same, but the methods have changed a lot.
The thing that has changed the most is that we are using MUCH more JavaScript and CSS. MUCH more. And that creates new requirements. Requirements like bundling and minifying, as well as testing even our front-end code. And in a lot of cases, we are authoring our code in other languages and have them “compiled”, or “transpiled”, into JavaScript and CSS, to make up for their “shortcomings”. Whether it be using CoffeScript or Dart for you JavaScript, or LESS or SASS for your CSS, it needs processing before we can use it… And this new way of building things has created the need for a front-end build pipeline… At least if you want to be really productive.
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