
Announcing Yeoman 1.0 beta 4 - cleverjake
http://addyosmani.com/blog/yeoman-update-announcing-1-0-beta-4/
======
_pius
Congratulations on the new release. Ironically, I tried Yeoman in earnest for
the first time yesterday.

I've got deep respect for the authors, but I've had a pretty miserable
experience with Yeoman so far, even after giving it another try this morning.
In particular:

* Using the web app generator seems to download an absurd number of dependencies every time. It takes _minutes_ to download everything to start a simple app, about as long as it takes me to install Rails from scratch on the same system.

* After generating an app, I've yet to be able to actually run grunt on the result ... it always errors out with something. If it's not a jshint warning that causes it to abort, it's a Compass warning.

One of the great joys of writing HTML5 + Javascript apps is that the
experience tends to feel clean and unencumbered. So far, Yeoman has done
nothing but make my workflow much more complex and error-prone. Things just
feel ... rickety. At the end of the day, I gave up and used Initializr [1] to
start the app. Didn't even want to bother trying out Brunch [2], I was so
frustrated.

I wanted to love it and I know there are folks out there who've had great luck
with Yeoman; hopefully some of them can chime in to tell me what I'm missing.

[1] <http://www.initializr.com/>

[2] <http://brunch.io>

~~~
bicknergseng
I started using it about two weeks ago and was pretty disappointed, too. The
1.0 beta was broken for things like coffeescript, backbone, custom generators,
etc, and they pulled the previous version of Yeoman from the site. I got it to
work for what I was trying to do, but spent twice as much time on Yeoman as I
did working on my app. Not unexpected given the pre 1.0 state of both Yeoman
and the Node community at large, but I wish they'd left the previous
(functional) version accessible.

Either way, excited to see this kind of community development. Great work on
Yeoman, excited about its potential.

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mberning
I could see where this would be useful for somebody just starting out, and
maybe that is what they are shooting for, but I see people outgrowing this
pretty fast. Once people reach a certain level of competence it's going to be
quicker and/or easier to set things up themselves.

~~~
jlongster
Others are disagreeing with you, but I actually agree. Yeoman isn't attractive
to me at all. It's a lot of boilerplate and the return just isn't enough. It's
much easier to directly set things up, and create custom boilerplates for my
needs.

~~~
greaterweb
I think there may be some confusion by some as to just what Yeoman is and it's
usefulness. My opinion is that Yeoman strives to improve your workflow and
tooling in front end development.

The core team has engaged the dev community and identified how people are
working, what tooling they use and what pain points they experience. Yeoman
serves to centralize workflow and tooling and ease those pain points. The
generators are very useful as well and extensible.

Again, Yeoman may not be right for everyone but I would be interested to know
more about your workflow and tooling and contrast it to some of the concepts
pursued. This feedback would be useful to those considering Yeoman.

~~~
jlongster
I think there's a certain kind of person that's attractive to these kind of
verbose, complex bootstrapping tools. Not that that's a bad thing at all, but
like you said, it's not for everyone.

I can see the usefulness, but when I try to use it, it just feels like it has
a steep learning curve and I could better invest my time elsewhere.

I use node heavily, and setting up the project, `npm install express` and a
few other libraries, only takes a few seconds. I can start writing code
quickly. I also don't create new projects _that_ often, but I can't imagine
most people are daily creating new projects.

At work we have our own django bootstrap that we can easily hack on and clone.

I can't say exactly why it doesn't fit my use case, but it just doesn't feel
right for some reason. It has a ton of dependencies. I don't see why I
shouldn't just use grunt and bower directly, etc etc.

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brian_c
Yeoman makes it quicker and easier to generate boilerplate code, but I think
the goal should be to __eliminate __boilerplate and abstract it away. Yeoman
keeps spaghetti organized, but it's still spaghetti.

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jongold
Stupid question but what kinds of projects are people using Yeoman & Brunch
etc for? I've been getting into lots of frontend MV* recently; a mix of stuff
that I put in the Rails asset pipeline at work, and fun hacks on the weekend
which I tend to use Brunch or Yeoman for.

Are people using Yeoman apps in production? How does it work deploying them &
handling load etc etc? I'm assuming that Yeoman is more useful than just toy
projects?

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crucialfelix
I was messing around with Yeoman this weekend. The real strength I think is in
the library of generators and the tools that the generator has in addition to
the grunt derived ones.

The default generator is a one page webapp and that makes everybody think that
that is what yeoman is, but there are many more:

[https://github.com/search?q=yeoman+generator&ref=cmdform](https://github.com/search?q=yeoman+generator&ref=cmdform)

65 repos there

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niyazpk
I am already using gruntjs for js/sass/images compression & combining,
template compilation, and a whole lot of other build related stuff. Can
somebody please convince me why I would want to switch to yeomen?

~~~
Narretz
You are not switching to Yeoman if you use grunt, since yeoman uses grunt for
all the tasks you mentioned. Yeoman is for quickly setting up and adding
common parts to your app. For example, in angular you can create controllers,
directives etc. skeletons, based on predefined or your own scaffolds. Using it
will only be good if the generator for your app is good.

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outside1234
Thanks for all the hard work - glad to see that Windows support is almost
ready. I'll give that a try.

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rschmitty
Is there an example with backbone requirejs and karma testing for yeoman out
in the wild?

