Yeoman: First impression

I have a LONG way to go when it comes to front end development, but its a path I’m really exited to walk on. I have a rough idea of the tools I’d like to try. However with all the really nice open source tools available, I (like many individuals) get nervous when trying to pick one.

A tool that got my attention, while I was trying to explore what MVC framework to pick for my FE projects?, was Yeoman. Yeoman is not an MVC framework, but it provides the setup around the FE development process to rapidly create / test webapp ideas.

###What’s Yeoman? As it states on their website: THE WEB’S SCAFFOLDING TOOL FOR MODERN WEBAPPS. It boils down to 3 tools:

• yo - the site scaffolding
• bower - package manager
• grunt - build tool

I highly recommend going through their codelab tutorial. The site claim it takes about 1 hour, but it took me a bit longer. Here’s a quick tutorial overview:

• npm install yo bower grunt-cli (node is required)
• Install your generator (the tutorial picked AngularJS)
• yo angular sets up the project
• grunt serve starts up the included server and watches over file changes to reload as they change
• bower install --save packages that you wish to include. They get added to the html automatically
• grunt test to run tests
• To get everything ready for production .. just grunt .. and the files should be ready to be deployed

###Some really nice features

• Live reload: See your changes on the page as soon as you make them. No need to manually reload the page

• Code linting: runs as part of the build process
• Minification of css/js files
• The build process completely automated
• All those generators (but I’ll probably be focusing on Angular for now)
• Backed up by some awesome folks - known for their open source contributions

###Next Steps

I can see myself loving Yeoman, but its too early as I haven’t really built something real with it yet. For now, I’ve picked AngularJS as my choice of front end MVC framework (the primary Yeoman generator) that I’d like to learn more of.

A good way to wrap up 2014 .. and a good todo list for 2015 :)

======================================================================

See an error in this post? Please submit a PR on Github.