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Comment by mackwic | Hacker News Reader

If you want boilerplate, the Yeoman collection tools: http://yeoman.io/ is what you need. There's boilerplate for a huge amount of projects, with generators of the parts (like: service for Angular, models for Ember, routes for Backbone...). The angular-generator is a very complex piece of work, but is extremely efficient. I highly suggest you to try it twice: once to fuck things up, another to understand the good way.

You can eventually use these CSS and HTML skeletons (http://html5up.net/) to do something neat, but I don't think someone will judge you because you used bootstrap.

In term of javascript development, I've found SugarJs (http://sugarjs.com) to be extremely productive and efficient for what I need, combined with the front-end framework of your choice.

And you, what's yours ?

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If you find that the Yeoman flow requires too much setup and ceremony, Brunch (http://brunch.io/) is a good lightweight alternative - faster to set up and also just faster in general at compiling assets. They have a lot of community-created app skeletons, and I've found it pretty useful at getting projects bootstrapped quickly without reinventing the wheel.

Thanks ! I'll definitely test that !

I love Yeoman, but after a very quick search I didn't see a nice generator with the OAuth 2.0 Authentication worked out, which can be handy.

There's the possibility that this project could be especially handy if it were turned in to a generator.

This is, i think, the main problem of their approach of the yo-catalog. So many packages who does so little things when we prefer to have little that do many.

We are the community, it's ours to think of a way to make a better yeoman ecosystem.

Web development newbie here: So how would I have used Yeoman to create something like Hackathon Starter?

Well, yeoman provides 3 tools: Yo, Grunt, and Bower. The first handle boilerplate and scaffholding, the second automation and the third is for 3rd party libraries provided to the browser (npm/gem/pip for the browser).

They have a catalog and as soon as you have choosen what you wanted inside, it keep things updated, clean dependencies, etc. The thing is, you still have to do the choices yourself. So, as a newbie, you quickly find the profusion of packages overwhelming.

So, assuming you want to make Hackathon Starter and you know how to do it you could:

1. Use this Generator: https://github.com/lukelarsen/generator-node-express that will boilerplate + scaffold your backend

2. change the rendering engine in server.js to Jade

3. Install front-end componnents: (do `bower install <component>` * font-awesome * lato * jquery * bootstrap

4. Then you'll write these nices views because that can't be generated. That's where the value of this project is.

5. This yeooman generator doesn't provide passport (auth system for Node) so you'll have to write it too. Maybe i didn't pick the best generator, sorry for that. Again, the project has lot of value with the working Passport system.

6. Glue things together with Js and CSS in the front-end, because that can't be generated neither.

There is work in this project, and yeoman is not the silver bullet. Just another tool to make things faster.

We use our product Exponential.

Exponential.io is Tooling as a Service. Basically, it creates 3 things really well via automation:

1. API

2. Angular app (and connects to the API)

3. Express app (optional. used for SEO)

signed up for your beta, was a bit confused there was no confirmation of sign up (email, or web) as it just returns to the homepage.

Same. No download available. As a big MEAN fan I would love to try it out.

Thanks for the links. I'm just getting started with Angular, in particular, so the link to the generator is an interesting piece of tech for me to pick through.

So I visited html5up.net and none of the demos want to load in firefox or chrome. Is it just me? Some of those templates looked quite usable :(.

Oddly enough it works perfectly fine in Chrome Version 33.0.1750.46 beta-m but it doesn't load in Firefox V 24.0, V 25.0 or V 26.0 so something is wrong with the page. It seems to load the iframe but instead of loading the whole page it just loads some widget div with nothing in it.

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