Introducing Grunt

The minifier that we used in the previous section greatly reduced the size of our style sheet and JavaScript files and also helped reduce the overall number of requests required to render MyPhoto. However, using it has one downside—every time that you make a change to either your CSS or JavaScript code during development, you are required to rerun the tool. This greatly slows down development and can even cause frustration and hair-tearing. (Just imagine forgetting to run the minifier, thinking that you ran it, and not seeing your changes appear. You are likely to blame your code as opposed to your forgetfulness.) Therefore, would it not be nice if we could minify and concatenate our files automatically every time that we make a change to our source code?

Meet Grunt, the JavaScript Task Runner (http://gruntjs.com/). As implied by its name, Grunt is a tool that allows us to automatically run any set of tasks. Grunt can even wait while you code, pick up changes made to your...