It has now been more than a year since I (@Swiip), quickly followed by @zckrs, started working on our Yeoman generator. Today we’re celebrating the release of our first major and stable version : generator-gulp-angular 1.0.0.
At first we simply wanted to make a good merge between generator-gulp-webapp and generator-angular as I worked on Angular and got tired of Grunt verbosity. Then, the project popularity started to increase and so did its ambition.
We followed all the precepts of Yeoman adding our owns:
- Gives a well written seed project following best recommendations in terms of folder structure and code style.
- Offers lots of options enabling the user to start instantly with the best tooling and optimization adapted to the latest technologies.
- Uses the concept of automatic injection in different parts of the project: scripts tags both vendor and sources in the index.html, styles files, vendor, css or preprocessed.
- Provides a test coverage as perfect as possible of the code of the generator but also of the generated code.
We’re not joking talking of a stable version. We integrated lots of technologies and languages, from Coffee to Typescript, from Sass to Stylus. The number of combinations of our options exceeds several millions! We wrote tests, documentation and fixed issues for 12 minor versions and 2 release candidates to be able to deliver a perfectly configured seed project whatever options you choose.
But the v1 is not the end of the road. While maintaining the v1 branch, we started a new Github organization called FountainJS targeting a futuristic v2 version. As the context of the build tools has greatly evolved over a year, it’ll be a reboot of the code base.
The major axes will be to use Yeoman generators composition, to upgrade to Gulp 4 and to write in ES6. Finally, I hope to open new horizons in terms of options: dependency management for sure, but why not also Web frameworks (someone talked about React?) and also a backend.
Go check our generator-gulp-webapp v1.0.0 release! Any feedbacks, issues, or investment on the new FountainJS project will always be appreciated.
