The world of front-end development has changed quite a bit in the last few years. When he was in college, he didn’t even know what a compiler was, let alone how useful they were. I wrote in plain old CSS instead of using preprocessing languages ​​like SASS or LESS. Also, I didn’t even know enough about JavaScript to know that frameworks existed.

Fast forward to the present, and I couldn’t imagine my life without Koala. In fact, I had to write simple CSS for a quick project a while back, and it was the most painful experience of my life. It was a grim reminder of what life would be like without a preprocessor. As for JavaScript, with performance always on the brain, you’d have to be crazy not to compile your scripts to one and minimize that. That’s easy bandwidth to save. To do both, you need to compile.

There are quite a few compilers in the world, some are command line and some have a GUI. Personally, command line compilers can be a bit of a hassle to get started with, as you have to learn the commands. If I can find a good program with a GUI, I’ll use it for sure. The more visual approach is a splash site when you’re trying to focus on bigger problems, like your project that the program is supposed to help you create. It does look cool to type commands at a command prompt though, I’m not going to lie.

Koala enters.

Koala is a great compiler with a very easy to use GUI. It can do quite a few things for you, including: compile SASS/LESS, compile Compass, compile CoffeeScript, compile and minify Javascript.

Setting it up is very easy. Once the app is open, it can easily tell you which folder to look at. After that, it automatically detects all valid files that it knows to compile. Just click on one of those files and a set of options will open.

For example, let’s take a SASS file. Every time you click on a SASS file, you get quite a few options. The most convenient would have to be the automatic compilation; this option ensures that your compiled SASS is kept up to date after each save. You can also choose to generate a source map along with the compiled CSS for easier debugging. Autoprefix is ​​a lifesaver; a little checkbox and you never have to worry about prefixing a bunch of CSS properties. Lastly, you can choose to minify the compiled CSS, which is always handy.

There aren’t that many options with JavaScript, other than minifying the script, which is useful. Aside from that, you can use a special comment code within the script itself to tell Koala to fetch other scripts. It’s pretty nifty to combine all your scripts into a single export. The only drawback of JavaScript compilation is that it doesn’t really work well with frameworks, like Angular.

In the end, I think Koala is a great app that can get you and your project up and running very quickly. All you have to do is install and run the program, tell it where the source files are, and you’re good to go. It’s hard to beat that simplicity.