Kent Quirk kentquirk

Build tools -- Make vs Grunt (vs Ant or other options)

We need to make a decision about build tools.

Make: venerable, but crusty. Dependency model doesn't work for a lot of things (you just have a list of commands). Not effectively cross platform -- Windows users in particular don't work well with make. Bit of a pain to set up but doesn't create additional dependencies. Everyone knows how to do easy stuff, but hard stuff can get really hard and ugly.
Grunt: the tool of choice for node projects. We're a node project. Cross platform. Pulls in lots of dependencies if you install it locally. Easy to set up the grunt files badly.
Pure JS scripts -- requires a little more scaffolding to set up; Grunt has that built in. Why bother? (See article below for one person's take on why he bothered.)
Jake: it's basically trying to do a make-like design but using javascript. Some good ideas, but like make, complex stuff requires a PhD to pull off.
Ant or Maven or

All our techniques are being tested and documented in the repository called dummy-api.

	# This is a small program that tests conversion to and from different formats
	# and makes sure that numbers that undergo conversion don't lose precision.

	import math

	# truncates a number to the given number of digits after the decimal
	def truncate(x, digits):
	p = math.pow(10, digits)
	return int(x * p)/p

	import os.path

	def dumpVars(r):
	apivars = [(k, type(getattr(r, k))) for k in dir(r) if not k.startswith('_') and not callable(getattr(r, k))]
	values = [(k[0], getattr(r, k[0])) for k in apivars]
	return values

	print dumpVars(os.path)