Shift (draft)

State and logic-less compiler and compressor interface

Shift is a generic Ruby interface to different compilers, compressors, transformers and so on. What the Tilt gem does for template languages, Shift does for stuff that compiles in one step, without stateful template logic.

Installation

gem install tilt

Usage

To read and process a file, using the preferred available default component for that filetype:


  Shift.read('thefile.js') # => minified js string

Or to read, process, and then write:


  Shift.read('canopy.sass').write('canopy.css')

The components can also be used directly:


  cc = Shift::ClosureCompiler.new(:compilation_level => 'ADVANCED_OPTIMIZATIONS')
  minified_js_string  = cc.read(path)

To simply process a string, or to process and save a string:


  md = Shift::RDiscount.new
  md.process("hello *there*") # => "<p>hello <em>there</em></p>"
  md.process("hello *there*").write('message.html')

To see if a component is available (check if the gem is installed and so on):


  Shift::YUICompressor.available?.

To get the first available preferred default component class for a file:


  Shift['somefile.js'] # => Shift::UglifyJS

You can also do:


  Shift[:md] # => Shift::RDiscount

Available engines

UglifyJS
ClosureCompiler
YUICompressor
CoffeeScript
Sass
RDiscount
Redcarpet

Why not use or extend Tilt instead?

I am making a separate library for this rather than extending Tilt, because i would usually only need one of the two in a given context. One and two step compilation are somewhat different things. Shift is more on the build side. Tilt is more on the dynamic side.

Bye

Bye Bye, see you. There are proper docs if you want more. And once again, the mappings are there too. Contributions and feedback is welcome, of course.