Grunt connect or grunt serve? - gruntjs

Question

I don't quite get the difference between the two. From the description, seems like both are for opening webserver.
If i used the grunt-serve plugin with the following configurations on my gruntfile.js
serve: {
options: {
port: 9000
}
}
I can open a webserver at the specified port, though i have to open the webserver manually at the browser (not sure how to make it open automatically on my default browser). The webserver is working fine, and can load JSON files without any problem.
However when i tried to do it with grunt connect plugin, with the following configurations
connect: {
server: {
options: {
port: 9000,
livereload: 35729,
hostname: 'localhost',
keepalive:true,
open:true
}
}
},
open: {
dev: {
url: 'http://localhost:<%= connect.server.options.port %>/index.html'
}
}
grunt.registerTask('serve', function (target) {
grunt.task.run([
'connect',
'open:dev'
]);
});
I could automatically opened a webserver at the specified port on my default browser, but the catch is, it couldn't load the JSON data like how grunt serve did.
I'd like to make the webserver works like Yeoman, where when running the command grunt serve, it would connect to the webserver and automatically open it on my default browser, and can load all my PHP/json files. Seems like grunt-serve plugin is the right plugin for this, but i'm sure grunt-connect can do the same thing as grunt-serve too.

Answer 1

according to https://github.com/gruntjs/grunt-contrib-connect the connect task makes the server available for a limited amount of time in order to run other tasks such as unit testing. Once the tasks are complete the server stops. As you have shown there is a keepalive option to prevent the server from stopping. Connect is also useful for connecting to resources on another domain such as a REST API. Typically this would be denied by the browser due to the same origin policy - see https://github.com/drewzboto/grunt-connect-proxy.
So for development I would use the standard pattern "grunt serve" and connect for testing and proxying to resources on another domain :-)