Improve and simplify javascript build processes.

[WardCunningham]

As our project has become both more diverse and more complex we're discovering many potential committers simply can't figure it out. Some contributing issues include:

• we host development and deployment as a single project
• we host multiple servers that attempt to adhere to disparate build conventions
• we have a mix of test automation approaches using both ruby and javascript

[nrn]

I think the best option right now is to hop on the Grunt bandwagon. It is an automated build tool with a lot of features that may be complex, but in return it offers a whole lot of convenience. The biggest reason to go this way is that there are a lot of heavy front end projects going this way, which helps a lot with having developers that are familiar with the tool. It should also be easy to put a couple of commands in the readme for people who don't want to get involved with the build process to make it work.

Grunt can be found here: http://gruntjs.com/

A good example of a grunt file doing similar stuff to what we would want, by some friends of mine: https://github.com/wearefractal/boiler/blob/master/build/grunt.coffee

[nrn]

So I sat down to work on this and grew more and more anxious that we were going to make our problem worse switching to grunt as a build process without first solving some of our redundancy and scatteredness. Especially with the multiple build systems/test frameworks. I settled on the temporary measure of adding the plugins to the builder.pl script #311. I'm not sure what a clean build process for this complex project would look like, so I'm looking for ideas on how to do this right (with or without grunt).