Recently Addy Osmani posted a sneak peek at Yeoman.io, which is described as a client-side stack, comprised of tools and frameworks that can help developers build beautiful web applications. For me, this is incredibly timely as at R/GA we have been making some effort to build tools to help us streamline our front-end development efforts, and keep the quality high.
At the time of writing, Yeoman was not quite ready to be released, but the teaser video and description of its capabilities look bang on to me. It tackles things like:
- Integrated package management
- Unit testing
- Boilerplates and scaffolding
- Build processes
- Linting and optimisation
- Built-in preview web server
- ...and much more
Addy gives a nice overview of some of the basics that all good front-end developers should aim to have as part of their development workflow in his blog post to accompany the introduction to Yeoman. I also particularly like the slightly more involved talk on the same topic from Paul Irish at Google IO.
It is little wonder that front-end development practices are coming of age gieven the ever increasing complexity and sophistication in web development. Great stuff.