Get Gulping

After reading “And just like that Grunt and RequireJS are out, it’s all about Gulp and Browserify now”, I realized the power of using one module pattern for both server-side and client-side code. That makes me want to start releasing a bunch of my “go-to” snippets as NPM modules. I seem to use some form of this code on every other project, why shouldn’t I just require( "mystuff" )?

I have included a variant of perfget on at least a dozen projects now. The original code, a collaboration between @CrossEye and I when we both worked at Travlers, really comes in handy for traversing large JavaScript objects safely and quickly. Because I have used the code for years and trust it, I often drop it into applications without a second thought.

Well, now you can too because I released it as an NPM module. The code also works in the browser because there are no dependencies to pull in. But if, like @mgenev, you want to use require( x ) in the browser, you will need to Browserify your files in a build step.

Speaking of build steps–I also want to mention Gulp. Because my project was small but I wanted it tight, I decided to take Gulp for a spin. My original tests used nodeunit because I was only testing property access. I don’t need much more than assert and a runner/reporter. I did not find a Gulp analog of grunt-contrib-nodeunit and I was loathe to making my own plugin on day one of using Gulp. So, I switched to Mocha via gulp-mocha.

While I appreciated the syntax and lighter feel of Gulp, I can’t say I’m a convert just yet. I need better examples of simple projects before I can go all in.