It would be really interesting to see build tools like grunt[1] or gulp[2] being used around frontend work.... I've recently been working on a personal project[3] with gulp and integration with maven through exec-maven-plugin and yeoman-maven-plugin[4]
It would allow us to pull external dependencies out of the code base and pull then in during compile time(bower[5]). It would allow us to minify all the javascript reducing page load times. It would allow for style checking along with other things.... It adds a huge dependency on NodeJS and NodeJS utilities though. [1] http://gruntjs.com/ [2] http://gulpjs.com/ [3] https://github.com/imduffy15/carcloud-api/blob/master/pom.xml [4] https://github.com/trecloux/yeoman-maven-plugin [5] http://bower.io/
