Finally and absolutely clarify path techniques in Webstorm

My installation is up-to-date in version 9.

1. I want to use Gulp and Grunt in Node.js web projects that have a website folder and an ExpressJs server folder.

2. I want to use npm-installed items and bower-installed items in their default (canonical) location.

3. I want all aspects of the development tools and utilities to have a single, shared understanding of the paths that make up the project.

4. I want all the paths to be relative to a standardized project root so that the project can be replicated, or it can be deployed manually or by configuration tools. And both techniques should have the ability to discover and utilize those canonical, relative paths as part of the process.

5. I want a simple-to-understand, well-established convention, as a feature built into the IDE, that accepts the reponsibility to manage and maintain this fundamental, critical aspect of the development process for as long as I use the IDE.


An IDE is an 'integrated development environment'. Webstorm seems to be at the 'bundle of features' level in relation to the overall conceptualization of what constitutes an IDE.

This is best exemplified by the 'help' documentation which is very hard to grasp because each help section focuses on each Webstorm feature and nowhere in any discussion does the awareness appear that the feature needs to demonstrate that the IDE designers understand that each feature must be part of the overall 'integrated development experience'.

This failure in communication is endemic throughout the application since the strategy of the Webstorm Product Management is to craft a separate extension as an 'integration' of this or that tool or framework that grows to sufficient popularity 'in the crowd'.

As a result of their decisions, I have yet to see in any example code or tranining video a consistent project concept of project configuration. Despite opinions to the contrary, chaos is not freedom because anything that prevents us from making progress is realisticly only a constraint.

So... I do not understand the Webstorm explanation of Content Roots or Path Variables because they do not provide a comprehensive explanation of how the Webstorm designers have decided to solve the problem of maintaining relative paths within any/every project and across all utilities, frameworks, and add-ins. So these explanations raise more questions than they answer.

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that the Webstorm designers do not have the awareness that taking the responsibility of maintaining this critical information across all features is among the first, second, or third primary qualifications for an application to be considered an IDE.

So would someone kindly explain how or where I can look to find a consistent path management convention that will extend across the primary group of frameworks that constitute a node.js application as well as across the bundle of features that Webstorm adds to the list of things the developer needs to manage.

Thanks,

Kimball Johnson