

Jam vs ender vs colo vs component vs browserify vs bower? - ep103

Which should I learn &#x2F; use?
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malandrew
Tell us more about your use case. I'm building a package manager so, I've
spend a lot of time with the source code of all of those and read many of the
comments of their authors in debates on ES6 Harmony modules/loaders and know a
lot about their pros and cons.

My personal preference for webapps is component.

What is your back-end? What is your frontend? Any frameworks? How important is
total uglified size to you? i.e. are you working for a company where every
100ms for each 100kb matters? How are you handling other assets like images,
css, etc? How familiar are you with node.js and the npm ecosystem?

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ep103
I currently work for an MS consulting shop. Historically, my tools have been
Asp.Net MVC / WebForms / WebAPI / WCF, MSSQL Server, and your standard
HTML5/JS/CSS3.

A few years ago I realized I loved javascript, so I've been studying
everything frontend with the hope of eventually leaving the JS hating MS
world, and going somewhere more JS oriented. For JS I've learned a good deal
of Backbone, Angular, Node.js, and soon I'll be focusing on WebGL.

I am familiar with npm.

I usually roll my own assets. Most solutions I've worked on haven't had a
heavy art presence, and having basic-decent photoshop / design understanding
has been sufficient.

As for company requirements, I really don't have any. I just know that I'm
going to pick at least one on that list to dive into, and was hoping for
community input before I put the time to learn investment in a framework. I
mean, if most development shops use one over the other, then I'd love to learn
that one! Or if one is up and coming, then that would be great too...

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malandrew
Given your situation, I'd say component, bower and browserify are all
interesting and worth checking out.

Bower really doesn't do much other than resolve dependencies, but that doesn't
mean you won't find it useful.

If you are really into the node.js ecosystem _and_ your back-end is node.js,
then browserify is worth checking out. If not, I'd opt for component.

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ep103
Thank you!

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brianchu
Note that bower is extremely lightweight; all it basically does is pull repos
from github. So it can hardly be considered a package manager. The rest all
offer various features above and beyond bower, AFAIK.

The reason bower is so popular is because it doesn't do very much.

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vittore
You better create poll and we'll see how many people use which. We use bower.

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htilford
They all solve slightly different problems, we use both bower and browserify

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ep103
what are the differences? Just a one liner overview would be great, if your
time is scarce : ))

