A new year can’t get any better to start with, than presenting in a local user group meet. I had this wonderful opportunity to talk about JavaScript Task Automation frameworks at the bdotnet meet on Jan 23, 2016.
The session was planned in a such a way to give a headstart to some of the popular task automation frameworks available out there. Started with explaining about the common JS tasks, why should we need automation around those tasks and then jumped into explaining and demoing the tools one by one.
A quick overview of the tools and concepts covered in the session
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bower – to manage the dependencies (js,css, assets etc.,) – showcased how to get started with bower, installing dependencies via bower and managing bower configuration files
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grunt – task automation framework – getting started with grunt, writing a basic hello world task, loading custom tasks from external file, configuring and running tasks from existing grunt plugins, demo’ed two of the use cases one dynamically wiring dependencies installed via bower using grunt-wiredep, and another live reload of application using grunt-contrib-watch, grunt-contrib-connect plugins
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yeoman – scaffolding tool to quickly create applications from standardized templates. Explained the benefits of using a scaffolding tool and then gave overview of gruntfile created by yeoman angular generator
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Cordova Hooks – cordova events that get triggered upon executing cordova commands. Demo’ed a sample hook to install/uninstall plugins automatically while running cordova platform add/rm commands.
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gulp – streaming build system – gave overview of how gulp is different from grunt and the gulpfile generated by yeoman aspnet generator.
Overall, it was an interactive session and I believe the audience enjoyed the session as much as I did!
Other useful links:
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Presentation used in the session – http://bit.ly/js-task-automation
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Code Samples – grunt demo, cordova hooks demo
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My Previous posts on grunt and bower – grunt-getting-started, live reload
Swaminathan Vetri 