

AngularJS application starter comparison - dcancro
http://www.dancancro.com/comparison-of-angularjs-application-starters/
A side-by-side comparison of things you can use to get started making an app with AngularJS
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whitehat2k9
Am I the only one around here who prefers starting from scratch in a blank vim
session?

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Bahamut
I do like generators for one reason - setting up a Gruntfile with all the
details you want can be tedious (in addition to all the dependencies in your
package.json), not to mention setting up stuff like Bower.

That's a bunch of wasted time setting up boilerplate. Generators tend to not
be perfect, since we as developers can get opinionated, but I'm fine with
tweaking from the boilerplate to get the results I want, which takes less time
than setting everything up from scratch.

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IBCNU
Dude setting up an angular project can be a huge headache. We use a hand built
generator just for our needs, but npm in so insanely unstable that we have to
get in and end up doing a lot of configuring of the gulp / gruntfile and
packages etc.

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Kiro
I don't recognize your problems at all. Do you mind elaborating on what
headaches setting up an Angular project gives you?

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IBCNU
I guess I'm complaining about npm more than Angular per se. Most of our issues
stem from the myriad package dependencies "in the wild" of npm itself. It's
like tilling a field in the wind. Often one has to `npm install` >3 times to
install all of your modules. I guess that's what happens when you have ten
billion cooks in the kitchen.

~~~
joevandyk
Is using npm worth it? Would it be simpler to download the dependencies
yourself and put them into a vendor directory?

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Silhouette
The web development industry, and particularly the front-end side, currently
seems to be obsessed with (or maybe plagued by) tools that sort of do half the
job you sometimes want but feel like you have to always use anyway because
everyone else is or appears to be or at least says you should on their
TwitBookBlogFeed.

I wanted to do exactly what you describe yesterday -- just download the latest
stable version of a one-JS-file library to include on one page of a web app
where its functionality is relevant. We used to do this by downloading
example-1.0.8.min.js from the obvious Download link on www.example.com.

As it turns out, the project from yesterday lives in a GitHub repository with
a dozen files scattered across a root and four subdirectories. I honestly have
no idea how to build it; it's written in a compiled-to-JS language, the build
instructions are a one-liner that refer to a build tool I've heard of but
never used, and there are at least half a dozen other files in the project
that seem to be there only for some sort of compatibility with various other
tools I've heard of but never used/don't use on this project/don't have
installed on this workstation.

I find myself reminded almost daily of this now-infamous XKCD:
[http://xkcd.com/927/](http://xkcd.com/927/)

This is not progress. :-(

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thurn
I think Closure Compiler integration is really important for Angular, since it
has built-in support for the framework (it allows automatic injection based on
parameter names). It also does really good minification and dead code
elimination. Sadly, it's still pretty hard to get started with, I think
[https://github.com/zemirco/nghellostyle](https://github.com/zemirco/nghellostyle)
is the best example I've seen.

~~~
aikah
Isnt the compiler written in java? I think that's the heart of the problem,
you aint gona get the javascript community behind that tool if it's not
written in js,or at least something that cant be easily packaged with npm.Time
to write a Java2Js transpiler,in javascript...

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jere
Seems odd to make a decision on framework by watching a couple of videos, but
then compare dozens of application starters along hundreds of dimensions. I
would think the choice of starter would be much less important.

Between the choice of framework, package manager, task runner, test framework,
test runner, CI service, seed project, and a million plugins for each of the
above, I have no fucking clue how anyone keeps up or writes a line of code
anymore. And that's just the front end.

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rrrx3
This is a pretty good run-down. I'm somewhat in the same boat, so it's nice to
see this breakdown.

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aquadrop
Thanks for your work, interesting information.

