Grunt vs Gulp

Tools

This theme of the course makes the developer's life easier

#Outcomes:

Be able to describe why tools are useful and what specific types of tools do Install and maintain their personal tool set Modify the behavior of specific tools to customize them Organize projects to make sure that a particular tool chain is in place

#Tool types

Task automation - reducing the work for common tasks and improving reliability Preprocessors

Grunt vs Gulp

One of the main themes of the class is tools. So our choice of task running is critical. We need to teach either grunt or gulp or both.

Today I [az] am under the following impressions:

• Grunt is more popular than gulp
• Gulp is a better design

Let's examine these two things to see if they are true and, if so, if they matter.

Assertion: Grunt is more popular than gulp

Argument for:

Factoids:

• Bootstrap 4 is built with grunt https://scotch.io/bar-talk/whats-new-in-bootstrap-4 and bootstrap is a big part of the front end sequence, introduced in part 2 (Primer Pro) and expanded upon in part 3 (AFE)

Argument against

Does it matter?

#Gulp

some of the tools in the chain help the programmer (Sass, for one). Some improve performance. http://yeoman.io/blog/performance-optimization.html

In general, the front end of the tool chain lets you work like a human and the back end produces code that makes your pages snappy and the browser happy.