Gulp or Grunt?

OK, let’s have it, are you a Gulper or a Grunter?

To some, build systems are a major issue. To me, not so much. In the end, you will have to maintain them, be it batchfiles or large codeblocks matching the size of the system you are trying to deploy.

If you spend nontrivial amounts of time debugging your build setup, I do beileve that you should think again though!

Grunt is heavily ANT-inspired. Dependencies that depends on other dependencies. In the end, it can be quite tricky to see the flow between the tasks. But it is easy to get started with it.

Gulp is the flavour of the month. React-inspired code, with immutable functions applied on streams, where all data/actions are viewed as streams, attract the hipsters and academics that like to brag about the latest in software development. But it is kind of cool I guess.

Me, I’m somewhere in between. I can use both, they both have good and bad sides. I had the same problem choosing between ANT, Maven and Gradle before.

Ultimately, it depends on how well you know the tool to use it professionally. The tool itself does only a small part of the job.