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Comment by jbm | Hacker News Reader

I used this library for an internal project for my employer after seeing it on Hacker News

I found it relatively easy to use, but it was a pretty simple thing I was dealing with (one-page registration scheme). Having Coffeescript built in was quite nice, since I find it much easier to deal with.

I don't see it as being better than major CMS-style js libraries like Angular JS (which I started playing with recently), but it was pretty easier to learn for the toy application I was building. Being able to deploy to Heroku through the command line is neat, and the auto-reload on changing the HTML was pretty cool too.

(I'm not in any way affiliated to the person who wrote it, just someone who used it for a small project.)

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Hey jbm, author of roots here. Really glad that you ended up using this (probably quite a few releases ago), and thanks for the feedback! I don't quite understand what you're getting at here though, because the libraries you are comparing it with are in no way similar.

AngularJS is a client-side javascript MVC framework and roots/axis are a static site compiler and a css library, respectively. It's easy to use roots with a client-side mvc framework if you prefer, I even have built in precompiled templates to make it easier.

Hey, thanks for the framework. I liked Roots.cx, and I found that a lot of the functionality that I really liked therein. Kudos!

My comment probably needed to be more thoroughly thought out before being posted.

My main issue with roots (and the reason I probably will not be using it in the future) is that I need to assume whoever takes over for me in 2 years will understand how to use Roots (and to make sure it is still updated). I can be pretty sure that Bootstrap will still be updated and maintained, but I can't be sure of the same with Roots. It makes it hard to use in a work context for anything major.

I will take a closer look at Roots and your pre-compiled templates for my personal projects, thanks for letting me know about it.

If it helps, I can assure you personally that it will. Roots is being aggressively developed right now and is already in use for several high-visibility projects at the company I work at full time.

If anything, in a couple years roots will have expanded quite a good amount and, based on my current plans for the future, it will ship with a compiler that several orders of magnitude faster, be quite a bit more flexible with more languages and templates, be coupled with an optional cheap and efficient static hosting service with post-deploy compile hooks, and have a well-developed dynamic CMS that it can be paired with.

>CMS-style js libraries like Angular JS

CMS as in Content Management Framework?

Oh drat. I meant MVC, wasn't thinking straight when I wrote that.

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