Pain is Opportunity

When I first decided to dive into a few Node.js and JavaScript projects, I was frustrated by how little guidance and convention I found in structuring, building and testing these kinds of projects. A lot of what I found seemed like lots of copy and paste solutions that would require several minutes of tweaking between projects. While I did stumble upon Require.js and Ender, neither of these addressed all the things I was concerned about and both were very prescriptive and really only handled one type of solution.

First Big CoffeeScript Project

So I set out to write a tool that would

• Generate a project scaffold
• Combine .js and/or .coffee files into build output in a predictable way
• Run lint against the output scripts
• Uglify each output script
• Gzip each output script
• Be capable of producing different outputs based on different build configurations
• Generate HTML scaffold for integration tests
• Host some form of test runner
• Continuously “build” in the background on file changes

As of several minor versions ago, Anvil is self-built and comes with a few additional features not listed. I’ve found that I can spin up projects very quickly and have running tests in no-time.

Screen Cast

Rather than make you read how easy it is to get started with Anvil, I thought it might be nice to do a screen cast and **show** you how simple it is.

An Intro To Anvil.js from Alex Robson on Vimeo.

Hope you enjoy!