Build Automation and Deployment for Javascript

Question

I work in the digital division of a public broadcaster with two other interface developers. We are currently studying the process of Javascript processing and process creation. Things like packaging, mining, versioning, etc.

In an ideal scenario, we will have a global repository for all Javascript-related libraries (such as jQuery) and what we create ourselves, which can easily be included in many projects and versions.

All our third-party developers use Maven for this process with their Java code. I am wondering if people have experience with Maven and Javascript, or perhaps other tools that might be good (or better) to work with. In general, if people have good resources about setting up workflow / build processes for interface development and javascript.

Answer 1

** edit ** Go straight to Jawr , staying in charge of alternatives ** change **

First of all, there is Ruby rake , which theoretically can be used through jruby and theoretically can be configured and run in POM.

There is also Jake , but not sure if the latest Rhino supports CommonJS .

While writing this awnser, I just stumbled upon Jawr , which looks really interesting and seems like maven support / plugins .

The last option that you already know about is dynamic loading, for example, RequireJS or LABJS .

Answer 2

We use Hudson ( http://hudson-ci.org/ ) to continuously build / integrate our Python (Django via zc.buildout), R, and several other types of projects. Whenever someone checks the code for a central VCS, the build starts and the test suite starts. Assembly and testing status is displayed on the central screen in the office.

Hudson not only builds and tests, but also checks for coding style and syntax errors using pep8 and pyflakes, among others. Javascript is only being tested with jslint at the moment, but we can test to use something like xpcshell in the future ( more information ).