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Comment by akanet | Hacker News Reader

God, he makes it look good. The demo does give me a few of the ol' "too much magic" heebie jeebies, but frontend JS development is so badly lacking in compelling packaage management stories that I'm going to give jspm a shot.

Here's to 2015, I suppose.

P.S. Glen, if you're reading this, I really would love to see a youtube of a DJ hooked up to automatically synced GIFs. Don't be a tease.

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npm is not just a server side package manager. It handles package management for the front-end very well and has for a long time, learn more here -- http://browserify.org/.

I'm a bit torn over using npm this way. On one hand, being able to use tools already built in Node land such as the EventEmitter is nice. On the other hand, having to use Browserify and navigating the mess of node modules is a pita. If the dependency structure with Node modules for npm dependencies were handled better, I would likely be all for it, but it is a major negative for me, especially if a quick project starts off as a mix of a Node server and contains a moderate amount of frontend heavy logic.

I happily use Webpack and NPM and have no problems with it.

NPM is in fact fine for frontend package management, it's not just about being able to use "Node land tools". All my frontend deps are on NPM, I published some NPM packages myself, and I don't even use Node.

Yes there are small issues (like wanting to be able to specify non-dupe requirement for some libraries) but overall NPM works fine for frontend. Much better than Bower if your app is moderately complex.

Agreed. I never saw the point of Bower, since it requires Node itself anyway. With tools like Browserify (and, I assume, Webpack... haven't had a chance to use it yet), you can load dependencies into your project extremely easily: `npm install backbone --save-dev`, then `var Backbone = require('backbone');` in your code.

Do you have time to hear about our lord and saviour browserify ?

I thought jspm looked like a direct browserify competitor/replacement. Is that an incorrect interpretation?

I am not sure familiar with jspm or bower. In the limited 60 second window that i researched their site it seems jsmp doesn't have as much documentation as broswerify. If jspm comes up more often in npm then I will think about it.

'I really would love to see a youtube of a DJ hooked up to automatically synced GIFs. ' Yes, this please !

( and if not, an invite to your next rooftop party would probably suffice )

If you have new projects you can try this out on with out too much risk, then please do give this a go and report/blog about it!

(I, too, am extremely dissatisfied with the current state of ES5-based JS modularity. Frankly it's incredible that anyone can get anything done at all given the state of tooling for modularity/building/deployment ATM.)

For package management why not use Bower ?

http://jspm.io

Bower is great if you need to install jQuery or one of its plugins, or another very popular JS framework.

When you get into smaller modules, persistence, recursive or deep dependency trees, versioning, automated bundling (i.e. no manual "config" files), etc. then bower is not a strong choice.

A good writeup here: https://github.com/bionode/bionode/issues/9#issuecomment-495...

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