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As we understood from the previous lesson building and
deployment of websites involves a lot of steps.
And we looked at the use of [INAUDIBLE] scripts for
doing the building and deployment tasks.
In this lesson, we will concentrate on task renders.
Two in particular, Grunt and Gulp, and try to understand how
they facilitate their automation of the various web developement tasks.
The primary task of a Task Runner is to enable to us to configure the tasks and
then rerun them automatically as it when request.
In the previous Lesson, we show the user NPM scripts that we set up in
the package.json file in order to automate some of these tasks,
including the use of the on change to automatically
run some of these tasks based upon changes to files that are made.
Now, thinking back, we realize that we are in the Node ecosystem.
And what Node enables us to do is to run JavaScript on the desktop.
Now, better luck than people, the programmers as you know of them,
took on the task of using JavaScript itself to write
applications that enable us to set up and run these tasks automatically.
So this is where the task runners came into the picture.
Grunt, Gulp, Cake, Brunch, Broccoli.
What's this obsession with food?
Well when you're sitting in a single place for a long time, you develop a big
appetite, Grunt and Gulp being the two most successful in this field.
We'll look at both of them in more detail in this lesson.
These enable us to double up automated tasks for
executing and building and deploying our website.
As I mentioned, the JavaScript based task runners, the two
of them in particular that we will deal with in this lesson are Grunt and Gulp.
Grunt operates based on doing configuration
whereas Gulp concentrates more on code.
We'll look at the two of them in more detail as we go along.
But both of them pretty much enable us to accomplish the same kind of tasks.
Both are built around plugins.
So, both Grunt and Gulp provide a framework for which
you write various plugins that enable you to perform these kinds of tasks.
So Grunt and Gulp together with their plugins enable us to configure and
execute various tasks.
If you ask me, is Grunt better or is Gulp better, that's a tough question to answer.
The Grunt people are grunting all over,
saying that theirs is the best way of doing it.
Which the Gulp community finds hard to swallow.
Both these communities can easily give your televangelists a run for their money.
But, from my perspective,
I look at any of these tools as just mechanisms to get my work done.
So long as it gets my work done, I'm happy with it.
If one makes it easier to accomplish a set of tasks that has,
then I choose the one over the other for that particular project.
So my take is event VM scripts satisfies you, stable them.
If Grunt is the way to go, be my guest.
If Gulp is worth satisfies you, take you a big gulp and you'll be satisfied.
So having said that, let's take a look at both Grunt and Gulp.
I will show you how you perform the same set of tasks
that I did with the npm scripts in the previous lesson and the exercise.
By showing you the Grunt and the Gulp way of doing the same
sort of tasks in the exercises that follow this lecture.
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