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Comment by newobj | Hacker News Reader

How is this done atomically? e.g. a scattering of html/js/css coming down in random order is going to cause issues, for sure.

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With Backlift, you explicitly set the order that the files should be linked or concatenated in the config.yml file.

When assets are sent over via dropbox, backlift compiles each source file into a separate js or css product. Then all files are concatenated and minified using the order from config.yml.

Does that answer the question, or am I missing something?

I think newobj is referring to the non-atomic nature of dropbox sync: there is no "commit" or singular upload, but rather a continuous sequence of changes. The question then is: how does this affect deployment? For example you might see markup changes deployed without the corresponding css changes.

I would guess the answer is that the "deployment" is so lightweight and fast (minify a few text files and copy them somewhere) that it's ok to re-run the deployment step at every single new file change.

I'm a big fan of this workflow. Good job Cole!

Yes. The worst you might see is a few seconds of mismatched styling, or an occasional error that would resolve when the next dropbox cycle pushes a refresh. The only deployment operations that involve inter-file dependencies at this time are the minification and concatenation that occur during optimization. And we don't recommend turning on optimization during development-- it does slow things down, and we haven't implemented source mapping yet so you'd have to debug obfuscated code.

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