Synopsis

More and more developers are facing the challenge of organizing and deploying complex client-side Javascript apps. It turns out there are some excellent solutions to this problem bubbling up in the Ruby ecosystem. I am responsible for two complex Javascript applications at Yapp, and in this micro-talk, I will share a solid solution to this problem using open source Ruby projects.

I will cover:

• Intro to Rake::Pipeline
• This project was recently open sourced by Living Social
• An extension to Rake for dealing with a directory of inputs, a number of filters organized as a pipeline, and a directory of outputs
• Great for describing and executing the build step of a pure client-side application
• Under-documented as yet
• Logical Javascript organization and simple dependency management with mini-spade and Rake::Pipeline
• As rubyists, we love clean, well-organized project directory structure
• Here's how to achieve this for your javascript
• Concatenating & minifying assets
• A solid development environment with Rack, fssm, Puma and Rake::Pipeline
• Puma for using threads to hold requests while your assets are rebuilding
• Bonus: integrate automatic test execution
• fssm for watching your project files and proactively rebuilding assets