I need to compile / compact an "ever-growing" javascript app (round abouts 40k LoC, currently).
I don't have the time to integrate the "appropriate" tool for what I'm trying to do, something like require.js, as it requires modification of said code.
I was planning to just manually pile everything together to do a compact/compile routine, but at this point, I think that will make it quite difficult to maintain. (Ultimately, I'd like to keep the file structure broken down into its current hierarchy.)
That being said, I've been using a tool called Winless for .less compilation, andI really like its functionality:
I'm wondering if an analogous tool exists for js?
The Closure Compiler does a top notch job, and I hear that Uglifyjs is good too. I might end up using Closure's REST api to manually manage file sets, but I'm wondering if anything exists that abstracts the process a little bit - into a standalone windows gui?
I've been poking around for a couple weeks, but have not come up with anything solid.
Cheers -
Have a look at http://gruntjs.com/ - "The JavaScript Task Runner". It becomes dead easy to script tasks, which would be along the lines of
a) run JSHint (for spotting errors in your code)
b) Run any QUnit tests
c) and finally call Uglify.js to compress your source in to a compressed, deployable file (I include a version number in mine to avoid caching issues).