Buildtools Cleanup 

The build tools are still too monolithic, even with the new refactor.  One approach is to actually break the tools down into real separate applications that each perform a specific step with a suitable serialization in between.  Tools can be piped together. 

UPDATE: 3-09-2010

We are going to redo the build tools in JavaScript built on node.js.  The goal is to refactor the tools into a series of smaller components that can be used independently of one another.  Here's the stack I think we should use:

1. node.js:  Server-side JS runtime.  We'll use this as our base execution environment.  There are some other good alternatives that we should eventually support but node.js is async, fast, and relatively easy to build and install so it's a good starting point.
2. seed.js:  Flexible package manager for node.js.  With seed we should also repackage a bunch of existing JS libraries as seed packages for use on either the server or client side.
   1. The design of seed should expose everything as packages that can be swapped and replaced.  This gives us the freedom to change virtually any component of the system more easily.
3. tiki: Tiki is a CommonJS runtime that is compatible with the node/seed pairing on the server [excluding API's that don't make sense in the browser like http and file access].
4. pack.js - Package that can take any set of seed packages and build a JS file that can be loaded directly in the browser (using tiki as the runtime).
5. bundle.js - Package that can return non-JS assets inside of a seed package including automatically generating assets.  For example, you might use bundle.js to load a CSS file that is actually built automatically from SASS source.  When used in conjunction with pack.js, bundle.js can pre-build assets and generate a manifest of URLs that can be used by JS code running in the browser to access the same assets.
6. gentools.js - Package that the sc-gen generator tool.  Create templates and automatically generate code from it
7. node-proxy - Package that implements a generic pass-through proxy for node.  Useful for lots of folks but also needed by abbot
8. abbot.js  - Implements abbot built tools but in JS.  Builds on the above stack.