Ok, web application programmers. Get ready for a tectonic shift yet again.
The last few times the world shifted, it went from proprietary application servers to open source platforms, from server-generated flat HTML to Javsacript and Ajax, then jQuery, and from desktop applications to native and web-based mobile applications. This time, a completely new platform is coming from the world of Javascript. In recent months, a number of high profile re-architecture projects have landed success at companies like Walmart, Netflix and Living Social have proved that Node.JS and Javascript is becoming a viable, scalable alternative platform.
If you’re used to writing jQuery scripts and trying them from your browser, you’ll probably be surprised to know that over the past few years, tools have cropped up to make the old browser language more enterpris-ey.
For example, Jasmine, Karma and other tools have enabled unit and integration testing, Grunt was developed to provide Make and Ant-like build processes, Bower was created to download dependencies from GitHub for web applications, and even the Node Package Manager (npm) has been enlisted to provide tools for operations such as linting (JSLint, JSHint), providing runners for Grunt and plug-ins for Bower, and enabling the emerging project templating tool, Yeoman.
In this multi-part series, we'll take a tour of a few of these tools. Our first tutorial introduces project and dependency management from both the browser and server sides using Bower and npm.
The tutorials
- The Node Package Manager (npm)
- Bower, a browser library manager
- Grunt, a Javascript-based build tool
- Yeoman, a look at a JS platform builder (coming)