Control Add-ins Supercharged: Teaching gulp some useful tricks

My last demo introduces gulp, an amazingly simple task automation tool. You’ve seen what it is, how to set it up, and how to create a simple hello-world task. Now it’s time to teach gulp some useful tricks and make it automate the “build” process for the JavaScript and CSS files.

The first demo in this series uses a single-file approach, and there I stated that it’s a bad thing to develop like that. It’s bad to put all the functionality in one single file. However, that rule applies for development, not for runtime. Your browser actually prefers using a smaller number of JavaScript (or CSS) files. That’s why typical runtime JavaScript libraries are bundled. On top of bundling, you’ll also want to minify your JavaScript and CSS files to make them as small as possible, to further improve the download and initialization speed.

These are the things that today’s demo uses. So, head over to the https://github.com/vjekob/supercharged_01/tree/04-gulp-useful branch, and check out how to configure your gulp to build your JavaScript and CSS bundles from your source files.

Vjeko

Vjeko has been writing code for living since 1995, and he has shared his knowledge and experience in presentations, articles, blogs, and elsewhere since 2002. Hopelessly curious, passionate about technology, avid language learner no matter human or computer.

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