Gulp Tutorial - Introduction

http://robertdunaway.github.io

http://mashupjs.github.io

The Mashup is a learning tool that serves as a seed project for line-of-business applications. It’s goal is a shortened learning curve for building modern business applications and the reduction of technical debt.

This tutorial and more can be found in

Gulp - Quick guide to getting up and running today

Gulp Tutorial - Intro

The days of the casual web developer are over. Since the advent of Visual Studio and other IDEs it’s been possible to build post back styled line-of-business application with only a rudimentary understanding of web programming. ASP.NET developers tended toward tolerating JavaScript and hoping ASP.NET would generate the proper JavaScript.

WHY GULP

We are bombarded with a daily litany of new technologies “required” to build modern applications. While every new technology might not actually be “required” it’s important to have some understanding of each technologies place in this world.

This book is intended to get Gulp, a task runner, up and running for you today. It’s not intended to give you hidden secrets or even a thorough accounting of the Gulp API. Simply to get you up and running with working examples.

HOW TO USE THIS TUTORIAL

Working through this tutorial will expose you to a handful of the most important tasks you may need. I recommend following the tutorial, moving from chapter to chapter, in sequence. During this process you’ll experience some difficulties and resolving these will give you greater understanding of Gulp, Node, and NPM.

After you’ve completed the tutorial, pick a few tasks and apply them to your own project. Start with minification of your JavaScript and CSS.

Another common task is concatenating multiple JavaScript files together as this is a current common practice for performance. This is to compensate for a shortcoming of HTTP protocol. With the adoption of HTTP2, you will no longer be required to concatenate files for performance.

THE MASHUPJS

The MashupJS is a bootstrap for creating large enterprise applications. Its folder structure and Gulp implementation make it easy for development teams to build modules in isolation then combine their code with the MashupJS at build. The MashupJS is used as a code base for these tutorials to work against.

Source code for this tutorial

Start the tutorial using this code base:

https://github.com/MashupJS/gulp-tutorial

A completed tutorial can be found here:

https://github.com/MashupJS/gulp-tutorial-end-result

This tutorial and more can be found in

Gulp - Quick guide to getting up and running today