I am looking to develop a React JS web app, using react-boilerplate for development
https://github.com/react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate
But the above boilerplate doesn't seem to be updated quite often, which boilerplate should be used for building simple web apps
Create React App is pretty much a single command setup with all the basic React boilerplate code for you from the command line.
Although as others have said, ideally you should look into setting up your own boilerplate to suit your own needs and maintain it as you best see fit.
There is not a simple good answer to this problem. Ideally, you should create your own boilerplate and maintain it over time, because only you will know what are your most common needs. There are no perfect boilerplates and almost every boilerplate is opinionated.
You might try to create a boilerplate for yourself from React CRA or other sources that might fit your needs in a great measure. It takes time in the beginning, but after a while you might update it every few months to make sure it is up to date and make it the starting point for all your new projects.
Sometimes a good point of inspiration would be the Yeoman Generators. Take
a look here: Yeoman Generators
React-boilerplate no longer to maintain, it has some library doesn't upgrade yet. You can try this repository, same about structure and way to use.
https://github.com/react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate-cra-template
React-boilerplate is not being maintained. You can use ARc which is a React starter kit based on the Atomic Design methodology, while I'll suggest you use create-react-app which is strongly recommended by the community.
I don't understand why the generator-ionic (along with other ionic + Yeoman project)s are so popular.
I don't see what the advantages are in using a yeomen generator in this case, this is.
I understand why the Ionic framework is useful in a Cordova project (as we all know, the UI, ngCordova plugins, it uses AngularJS, ect) but what specifically does the Yeoman component add that a basic Ionic project doesn't already have or that cannot be easily added with a bower install.
It seems to me that the Yeoman ionic projects just seem to be unnecessary bloat and can lead to more errors and library issues. I just do not see how components like karma and grunt (as opposed to ionic using gulp) fit into help with development.
True, you can set all this up by yourself. However, imagine setting this up on each and every project that you start. Kind of cumbersome, don't you think?
That's why some people tend to create these generators - to save you (if you like) the time of having to scaffold your application every time from beginning. Usually they provide some features (about which you can read on the Github pages) or they may even enforce some kind of project directory layout (which may help with big projects).
All in all, you don't have to use them, or stress about them. For instance, I personally don't use them on every project, but I appreciate the community effort and when I want to try something quick I tend to test them from time to time to see how they've evolved.
Don't hate, donate ;) (Sure sure, I know you're not hating, the statement just seemed appropriate).
I'm searching some similar to PHPUnit Skeleton Generator just for Angular, maybe you could help me to find one ?
I'd recommend looking into the ng-boilerplate project. It sets you up with a sane structure, including where to put tests and running them.
You should familiarize yourself with yeoman which is a very nice scaffolding tool for JS projects.
It works around the concept of generators, different generators can generate different files for you. For example the angular-generator will help you with setting up an angular project and also add controllers, services and such.
After having been convinced to learn and use Angular.js, I was going to start a concrete web UI application so as to launch the learning wheel of experience. ( The app is going to be some kind of personal planning, to do list, reminder, pomodoro technique oriented, and so on...)
One of the tutorial videos I have seen, by the author of Angular, is about best practices. And one of the best practices is to start with the angular-seed project.
That is what I was going to do, but after googling a little, there are already at least two other projects that claim to be the good starting point:
angular-enterprise-seed
angular-sprout
I'm beginner, but I like to invest in the long term. Should I worry about using something else than angular-seed ? I feel like it's too early to ask myself this question, but if there are already two other projects, maybe there are some good reasons.
I've found that though many people use various seed projects, the easiest & most consistent starting point for an angular app (or any javascript web app) is Yeoman.
This app is a scaffolding tool that allows you to specify generators which will build the up the kernel of your application, complete with whatever libraries you desire (via bower) and a working grunt build file (most generators come stock with a build task, server task for live editing, and testing task)
Though an app like this is necessarily opinionated, the scaffolding it produces is still very generic.
example:
mkdir my-app
cd my-app
npm install generator-angular
npm install generator-karma
yo angular
They all have different merits so it depends on what you are looking to do. I wrote angular-enterprise-seed and can speak to its relative merits.
It is server-agnostic. This is important since a core tenet of AngularJS, and one of many things that make it attractive, is that it follows the Client MVC paradigm. This means it is entirely decoupled from any and all server technologies. Many existing seeds tie AngularJS to server technologies, such as angular-sprout (NodeJS) or grilled-feta (Google App Engine/Java). In the case of the aforementioned projects, if NodeJS and/or Java environments aren't already on your system, then you will have to go through several hoops just to see the seed come up. This can be alienating to PHP and Python developers, which results in limiting the project's community.
Up and running in seconds. Because it is server-agnostic, it can be run in any container (heck the filesystem for that matter). Suggested method is running "python -m SimpleHTTPServer" from the root directory -- this comes native on Mac and Linux so there are no additional steps.
Live preview. It's cheap to check on status of the project because a live version is always hosted on github. Because it's server agnostic, this is automatically done by copying master to the gh-pages branch from a cron job.
Rich styling. It includes Twitter Bootstrap and custom/buildable LESS out of the box, along with Angular-UI, Angular-NG, fonts, and a myriad of other tools to provide rich styling and responsiveness capabilities.
Widgets. Like Angular-Seed and Angular-Sprout, Angular-Enterprise-Seed exemplifies "best practice" layout, routing, etc. But it also provides a host of pre-built components that can be taken off the shelf and immediately reused. This is a bit difficult to do as it can require the convergence of several technologies. For example, to create the grid example, I combined angular-ui, angular-ng, angular-js, and jquery styling. There are component examples for modals, pagination, alerts, grids, and more.
Angular-seed is great as an academic exercise if you want to learn how the pieces work, but it will leave you longing for a more substantial jump-off point.
I haven't used angular-sprout so I can't speak to its merits. Maybe there is some room to merge angular-sprout and angular-enterprise-seed?
I recognize that this is an older question, but it seems to have a fair number of views, so it makes sense to recommend what has recently become a very popular alternative to both Yeoman and angular-seed: ng-boilerplate. ng-boilerplate differs from angular-seed in that it's designed from the ground up for large production web apps, and therefore is a better solution than angular-seed in my opinion.
To explain the differences between the Yeoman and ng-boilerplate methods of app kickstarting, I'll quote ngbp's creator, Josh D. Miller:
Yeoman is awesome. But the problem I have with the generators for AngularJS is that they package by layer rather than by feature. If we store all controllers in a "controllers" folder and all services in a "services" folder, etc., and all our tests someplace else entirely, it can be quite challenging to reuse our components.
This is also pretty good discussion by Josh on the Yeoman angular-generator issues forum, that goes more in depth regarding the setup of ng-boilerplate vs. yeoman.
Just to be clear, Yeoman is not a generator. Yeoman is a format/system for making generators. There are several generators made with Yeoman that you can use to generate an AngularJS application. People often mistakenly refer to one or another of them as "the" Yeoman generator. But there are many. Confused yet? Yeoman isn't the only generator making system. Brunch is another one.
To answer your question, here is a very comprehensive side-by-side comparison of many AngularJS generators one can use to start making a web application with AngularJS. Currently, it contains over 200 different aspects of these things. One of them is file organization style. So you can easily see which ones organize the files by feature if that's important to you. It is to me.
There are still several of these left to be added. The two mentioned in this thread are new to me. But this comparison should give you a good idea of the options and how they compare. It's editable too, so if any of you are experts in any of these things, feel free to share what you know.
God only knows why people keep making more and more of these things instead of just helping to improve the existing ones. If you have any guesses, I would love to have that mystery solved.
EDIT: to gain access to the doc I ask that you either complete a questionnaire to share your knowledge of something or lobby the experts to do so.
Go here to do a questionnaire:
http://www.dancancro.com/technology-questionnaires/
I like using Yeoman as well. Try these to get a good scaffold:
npm install -g generator-angular # install generator
yo angular # scaffold out a AngularJS project
bower install angular-ui # install a dependency for your project from Bower
grunt test # test your app
grunt server # preview your app
grunt # build the application for deployment
I looked into gruntjs but I'm not sure if it the right tool to solve my workflow problem. I' working on a huge angular project with 30+ js files already into it. Every time I add a new js file, I have to go to index file and add reference in it. Is there any way to automate this process with grunt or any other tool?
Absolutely! Here are two ways:
Yeoman
Yeoman is a set of integrated workflow management scripts built on Grunt and Bower that supports automatic scaffolding and compilation. There is an AngularJS generator for it too.
ngBoilerplate
This is my creation, so I definitely have a bias here, but it has a Grunt-based built system and a defined directory structure that makes managing non-trivial AngularJS apps super easy.