gulp 的作者是 Eric Schoffstall，今年应该只有22岁，The DigitalOcean Team 两年前评选的《20 Developers To Follow In 2014》中对他的介绍是：
This twenty year old star is one of our favorite rising developers. Despite his age, he's already been a featured speaker at numerous community JS events, traveling around the world when taking a break from coding. He founded Fractal in 2010, which does huge amounts of open source and consulting, and has created over 150 projects in his spare time.
gulp 是 Laravel 默认绑定的前端的前端构建工具，类似于对于 webpack 这种解析工具的工程化封装，提供了这些功能：
- gulp.src() 使用 Glob 方便的找到对应参数的所有匹配文件
- gulp.dest() 对操作输出的目标地址进行定位，被 pipe 用户 stream 中的操作
- gulp.task() 使用 Orchestrator 的机制定义的一些 task
- gulp.watch() 对程序进行监控，一旦 CSS 或者 JS 被修改了，就进行自动构建
gulp 的安装：
npm install --global gulp-cli
然后会调用目录里面的 gulpfile.js 文件进行构建，命令是：
gulp
gulp 也支持插件的机制，目前官方有2600多个插件：
http://gulpjs.com/plugins/
github gulp首页上推荐的几个插件：
- gulp-changed - only pass through changed files
- gulp-cached - in-memory file cache, not for operation on sets of files
- gulp-remember - pairs nicely with gulp-cached
- gulp-newer - pass through newer source files only, supports many:1 source:dest
Laravel 中的使用
Laravel 在具体使用的时候，使用：
laravel-elixir
laravel-elixir-vue
两个包对 gulp 进行了封装：
Laravel Elixir provides a clean, fluent API for defining basic Gulp tasks for your Laravel application. Elixir supports common CSS and JavaScript pre-processors like Sass and Webpack. Using method chaining, Elixir allows you to fluently define your asset pipeline. For example:
elixir(function(mix) {
mix.sass('app.scss')
.webpack('app.js');
});
具体使用的时候可以学习这篇文章：《Run Gulp Tasks in Laravel Easily with Elixir》
还有官方文档： 《Compiling Assets (Laravel Elixir)》
