Introduction
Modern front-end development involves numerous repetitive tasks: minifying JavaScript, compiling CoffeeScript or LESS, running JSHint to catch errors, concatenating files, running tests, and more. Performing these tasks manually is tedious and error-prone. Forget to minify before deployment? Your users download bloated files. Skip linting? Bugs slip through that could have been caught automatically.
Build automation has long been standard practice in back-end development, with tools like Make, Rake, and Ant handling compilation and deployment tasks. But front-end development has lacked a cohesive, JavaScript-native solution—until now.