#gulp.js

[themekeeper-blog1]

What Is Gulp?

New item has been added on ThemeKeeper.com https://themekeeper.com/web-design/what-is-gulp

What is Gulp? One description is that Gulp is a task runner. Another would be that it’s a toolkit for automating time-consuming tasks.

[themekeeper-blog1]

Optimize Your Website Without AMP: Optimization Checklist

New item has been added on ThemeKeeper.com https://themekeeper.com/web-design/optimize-website-without-amp-optimization-checklist

When you want to optimize a website’s performance manually, without using a ready-made approach like AMP, what are the key steps you need to take?

[themekeeper-blog1]

New Course: The Web Designer’s Guide to Gulp

New item has been added on ThemeKeeper.com https://themekeeper.com/web-design/new-course-web-designers-guide-gulp

Gulp is a tool that can be of great help to any web designer, but it can be intimidating for beginners. In our new course, The Web Designer’s Guide to Gulp, you’ll learn what Gulp is, how to set it up, and how to use it to create an awesome front-end workflow—even as a beginner. Join Adi Purdila for a comprehensive introduction to this powerful JavaScript task runner.

[codeholder-blog1]

Essential JavaScript Libraries and Frameworks You Should Know About

New item has been added on CodeHolder.net https://codeholder.net/code/essential-javascript-libraries-frameworks-know

JavaScript has been around for 20+ years, and it's one of those languages that never stop evolving. The language has been experiencing a fast-paced growth recently that makes me wonder whether the modern front-end JavaScript technologies that are well known today will be relevant a couple of years later.

[themekeeper-blog1]

New Course: Optimize Your Website Without AMP

New item has been added on ThemeKeeper.com https://themekeeper.com/web-design/new-course-optimize-website-without-amp

Google's AMP is a very useful collection of plug-and-play code to help you optimize your website. But there are times when you might want to go it alone. In our new course, Optimize Your Website Without AMP, you'll learn why you might decide not to use AMP in certain circumstances, and how you can do just as good an optimization job using other techniques.

[manavsmo-blog]

Gulp – A streaming build system. Sometimes called a “task runner,” which is built on NodeJS.

Automation can literally save you hours a day. 

Gulp.js is what we call a JavaScript Task Runner, it is Open Source, a new Node based automated task runner that has been causing lots of buzzes.

[codeholder-blog1]

New Short Course: Essential Gulp Tasks

New item has been added on CodeHolder.net https://codeholder.net/code/new-short-course-essential-gulp-tasks

Gulp is a build system for JavaScript that makes it easy to automate repetitive tasks like linting, minification, and transcoding.

[superradishwitch]

Game Builds With gulp.js

Breaking code up into smaller, easier to swallow files is a key part of software design. It encourages modularity in your code and makes hunting for a specific feature much easier. Game programming is no exception to that, and it’s becoming more notable with component-based frameworks like Unity, Phaser 3, and Unreal 4.

Super Radish Witch is written with Phaser 2 and JavaScript. With the latter’s global scope issues, we’ve been keen to keep the source code as small and sparse as possible.

This is great, although adding a new source file means adding a new script tag to the game’s HTML document.

<script src="src/player.js"></script> <script src="src/badguy.js"></script> <script src="src/powerup.js"></script>

It works, but you can end up having a huge header just to get your game’s source loaded. We’ve employed gulp.js to avoid having to update the game’s HTML with each class. Using the gulp npm package and a gulpfile, files can be streamed and concatenated into one JavaScript file for the browser to load.

Setting up a gulpfile is pretty simple, so we’ll encourage the reader to Google up a tutorial. You can process your code with the gulp-concat plugin and put the result in a temporary build folder.

var gulp = require('gulp'); var concat = require('gulp-concat'); gulp.task('compilegame', function () { gulp.src('./src/**/*.js') // <-- the '**/*.js' checks subfolders .pipe(concat('main.js')) .pipe(gulp.dest('./build')); gulp.src('./index.html').pipe(gulp.dest('./build')); });

If you keep gulp running, it will watch for changes in the files and automatically process them when you update your code. The process is pretty quick, so builds don’t typically interrupt your workflow.

gulp.js is pretty modular too, so you can add plugins and other goodies, such as gulp-babel for ECMAScript 2015 support.

var babel = require('gulp-babel'); // ... gulp.src('./src/**/*.js') .pipe(concat('main.js')) .pipe(babel()) .pipe(gulp.dest('./build'));

There are a few caveats though. The gulpfile won’t watch for new files added, so you’ll need to restart gulp.js when you create the script for your latest game object. Also, if a gulp plugin throws an error, the process will stop. We’ve caught ourselves refreshing the page a few times wondering why our changes aren’t appearing.

This piece is a bit longer than hoped, but overall we’ve found the tool really useful for keeping the HTML header small and adding automated features like transpiling and minifying. Hope it helps with your work too!