Learn Grunt, Nightmare and Xstream

Cycle.js is a framework where your app is described as a simple function taking an event stream as input and outputting an event stream.

cycle

This lesson is the first in an introduction to Cycle.js. We will see how to build from scratch a toy version of Cycle.js. See how to use RxJS to create simple web apps, and how to separate logic from effects.

Separate Logic from Effects in Cycle.js

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

Task automation is critical for any AngularJS single-page application. Grunt gets the job done.

Introduction to Grunt for Angular

Nightmare is a high-level browser automation library.

The goal is to expose just a few simple methods, and have an API that feels synchronous for each block of scripting, rather than deeply nested callbacks. It's designed for automating tasks across sites that don't have APIs.

nightmare

Many pages you'll want to grab data from will require you to log in first. This video demonstrates how to log in and grab whatever data off the page you will need.

Scraping Data from Sites with Login Forms with Nightmare

grunt

GruntJS allows you to use underscore/erb style templates to reduce repetition and create variables. This is commonly used to point at build folders and files within your application's structure.

Template

In this lesson John will show you how to start using Grunt Uglify to compress your javascript for production deployment.

Uglify

Many websites have more than just simple static content. Dynamic content which is rendered by JavaScript requires browser to be able to scrape data. This video demonstrates how to use Nightmare (which is a wrapper around Electron) to launch a url and scrape dynamic data.

Scraping Dynamic JavaScript Websites with Nightmare

Grunt Multitask allows you to write complex tasks that run multiple targets. In this lesson, John will show you how to use Multitask in your GruntJS builds.

Multitask

You can use Grunt to combine all of your Javascript files into a single concatenated file.

Concatenating Your Javascript with grunt-contrib-concat

For production we want to use minified javascript to reduce the payload that is sent from the server. This can easily be accomplished with grunt-uglify.

Minifying your output with grunt-uglify

In this lesson John will show you how to get started with grunt-contrib-watch. Watch is an essential component of any Grunt build, and you will find yourself using it in almost every project. 

Grunt Watch

Grunt will clean up your build with the grunt-contrib-clean to make sure that no artifacts from previous builds are hanging around.

Cleaning your build folder with grunt-contrib-clean

With Grunt you can automate core tasks for your AngularJS project. In this lesson we will take a look at converting Stylus files to CSS, and add a watch task to convert those files automatically whenever a change is detected.

Development Automation Tasks with Grunt

Build and watch ECMAscript 6 using traceur compiler and Grunt.

traceur compiler and Grunt

In this lesson John will show you how to create a simple external config file for your GruntJS build.

External Config

In this lesson you will install GruntJS and get up and running with your first task, initial configuration, and how to get Grunt methods auto-completing in WebStorm.

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