Yeoman is a robust and opinionated set of
tools, libraries, and a workflow that can
help developers quickly build beautiful,
compelling web apps.
Yeoman is a robust and opinionated set of
tools, libraries, and a workflow that can
help developers quickly build beautiful,
compelling web apps.
It has many capabilities useful to the modern web dev workflow.
Of most note to me, it acts as a "project creation" tool. AKA "A Scaffolding generator."
It will pull things like HTML5 Boilerplate, jQuery, Backbone.js, etc down from github, and properly generate the project files you need to start a project with those dependencies.
You dont have to worry about how any of it fits together, it will get you up and running with the latest version of everything with a simple commandline.
It also does things like minify css and javascript, as well as compiling LESS/SASS and Coffeescript.
They are unfortunately trying to make a single tool that solves many problems, when they might be better served by making many tools, that are all good at 1 thing each... I'm still waiting for them to launch this so I can see how that all pans out.
"You don't have to worry about how any of it fits together..." That doesn't seem like an advantage.
If someone is churning out websites right and left I could see this being a more interesting tool, as it seems to be more powerful that any "boilerplate generation" scripts I would write myself.
The pain point of managing dependencies is indeed non-trivial in my experience, so I will keep an open mind for tools that look to solve this.
Random stream-of-consciousness idea: I create a new directory, and in it a text file containing the following on separate lines: "jQuery html5boilerplate AngularJS". I then run a build command to pull all these resources together in a sane way. This would allow me the fine-grained control I prefer, help ease the tedium of fetching dependencies, and obviate the need for a stream of "yes/no" questions at the terminal. This functionality may exist already, and it seems like it could be built by leveraging the logic being Yeoman, but with a different "UI".
Food for thought!