An Interface Developer's guide to build tools

What are build tools to us?

Interface Developers don't traditionally have much of a relationship with build tools. HTML, CSS and JavaScript require no compilation and the Application Developers on a project will often be in charge of the build.

This is changing. Our JavaScript needs validating (via JSLint) and, along with our CSS, compressing and concatenating. If you use SASS (I'm not quite convinced enough to yet) you will already be generating the final version of your CSS. Even HTML, when split into modules can need combining into flat templates.

It's becoming more a part of our jobs but it can be a sharper learning curve than for, say, Application Developers. Build tools are written in languages unfamiliar to the average ID and most of their documentation is written for developers who work in those languages, which usually isn't us.

Having hit the above walls I thought it was worth putting my understanding down, based on the tools I've worked with to date.

What is a build tool?

Programs, in a very basic way, are us writing down a process in a way a computer understands. With that in mind it will always seem obvious to programmers to have as much of their working processes also being programs. That way, you write it once and run it when you need to.

Builds are a way to formalise this; you write a build file describing your process and the build tool runs it.

Build scripts are usually centered around a few things:

• The chaining together of a series of processes
• The configuration of this being separate from those processes
• The sequence in which the processes are run is also part of the configuration

One idea of how to do it

There should be a natural workflow for using build tools:

• Write a plan of your process (not a build script)
• Turn this into a build script
• Configure the use of your build tool so you can run it in one step (like clicking a button on a web interface)

The posts

I'm going to write about Apache's Ant and Maven, both Java-based tools. This is because those are the ones used by JSLint4Java (see my post) and Rhino, mentioned in my post on using it to run JSLint.

So far, we have an article on Ant. The Maven article will follow soon when I can do it justice :)

I'm also planning to actually write some build scripts for each tool to complement the articles so keep an eye out in future.