You kinda can. I'm seriously considering that in conjunction with <http://entrproject.org/> for watching file changes.
I wrote the book Automate With Grunt out of anger at the terrible docs for Grunt and my displeasure that there was yet another build system out there. And just as the book was released, Gulp came along. Then Webpack. And now there's tools like Brunch.
I still use Grunt, because I spent time learning it. And I'll be damned if I'm going to waste time learning a new tool without a really good reason other than "Coke vs Pepsi".
(edited for organization because I'm tired.)
After trying out Grunt and Gulp, I found Gulp to be more to my liking because the tasks are written as actual JS code, not as a pile of configuration. Plus, it runs the tasks in parallel if they don't depend on each other, whereas Grunt defaults to running them sequentially.
It's nice that there are people willing to address problems, but it would be nice for web development to grow out of its "oooh shiny" phase.
To be honest, I prefer learning by reading specs/documentation, tinkering and Google-ing specific bits, not by watching tutorials, so I did not know this. That's not ideal conceptually, but it does mean one less tool in the pipeline, which is not a bad thing for beginners.
> it would be nice for web development to grow out of its "oooh shiny" phase.
Absolutely. Just as long as it doesn't swing to the other extreme, like PHP does, where 12-year-old and deprecated techniques are still entrenched at the top of Google... :)
Sounds like a terrible way to build commercial software.
The problem isn't that old things don't die away quickly - far from it - the problem is that we have too many new things coming in that keep changing every few days.
I'm building a 10k line coffeescript app that works on top of react. All I care about is getting a toolchain to compile the coffeescript and generate source maps.
I don't care about dicking around with npm and node and grunt other than to make the build process work.
Tell me why I should care about grunt or gulp or webpack?
React introduces a massive win over traditional ways of building UIs that makes learning how to write apps with it worth learning. Why should I care about learning grunt and then learning gulp and then learning webpack, when all I'm using it for is to compile my coffeescript?
If I could get away with a Makefile, I probably would.