Understanding the role of "building" in an open source javascript package?

Question

I'm kind of a noob to this kind of thing. I'm interested in using MIDI.js (https://github.com/mudcube/MIDI.js/) to build a musical web app, not too different from the demos they have listed and downloadable.

My expectation of MIDI.js, which is not well documented, is that it would be a bunch of javascript code that I can use, sort of like jquery.

So I don't have an understanding of the role of a "build" folder, or node.js, or a gruntfile (barely know what that is).

My question is, what is their to build? There are several example html files (with js) included in the download that run right away on my local apache server, so what is left to be built?

Thanks

ioseph · Accepted Answer · 2014-04-03 05:33:47Z

1

From the repo it looks like the build step simply concatenates the various source files into a single MIDI.js file as well as creating the minified version.

answered Apr 3, 2014 at 5:33

ioseph

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2 Comments

user3391564 Over a year ago

I haven't done any building, but in the build folder in my clone of the repo, there already is a MIDI.js and MIDI.min.js file. MIDI.js is over 1300 lines of code...so it seems like it's already 'built'. Would that mean the Gruntfile.js is for rebuilding it if I make changes to the files that get concatenated into MIDI.js?

ioseph Over a year ago

That's correct. It's pretty typical to include the gruntfile in js libraries, for example you may want to add your own tasks, such as jslint, or incorporate the libraries build step as part of a larger project.

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