Support for CSS pre-processing

[matschaffer]

Many rapid web application development frameworks (Grails, Rails, Play) support an asset pipeline or some other facility for pre-processing web assets such as LESS -> CSS.

Having this support in pytheas would be ideal.

[quidryan]

There's a few examples of people using CSS/JS processing (LESS,Closure, etc) in Gradle. That could be leverages (though it still wouldn't be as good integration as what Play/SBT or Grails/Gant)

[matschaffer]

Not a bad idea actually. Do you know of a way to get gradle monitoring for file changes and rebuilding?

[quidryan]

There's no known way of monitoring for file changes. I've seen an example the just exec'd grunt to do that, but that's obviously not ideal.

[davidmc24]

I haven't yet seen a LESS plugin for Gradle that has support for a "watch" mode (probably mostly because lesscss-java doesn't yet support it). @robfletcher's gradle-compass plugin has this sort of mode, though.

https://github.com/robfletcher/gradle-compass

[robfletcher]

My plugin uses the built-in file watching in Compass to do that. It's noticeably slower than doing the same thing with straight Grunt, though.