Twitter's Bower

[silvinci]

Twitter has released its own components manager, called Bower. It was open-sourced 4 days ago.

I don't like it and I think it's a good example for how component should not be. I especially dislike their way of defining a component. Awful. We're doing it way better, with a clear separation of file types.

But bower do has a point: they use a centralized npm like registry. If we'd adapt to that we'd have name collisions, so a list with the full addresses of the repositories would be great. I think this was brought up in an issue before.

What do you guys think of bower? Which ideas are good, which are no-go?

[vision media [ Tj Holowaychuk ]]

centralized is a big -1 for me, we only really need something like that to implement component-search(1), soon github will allow searching by filename so we can just sniff out the component.json files

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "component" group.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to componentjs...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

[silvinci]

Awesome! I don't like the centralized approach either. And now that we have GitHub's search fuction we don't need it anymore. Really nice.

However: How can one find components by keywords? Will GitHub allow searching not only by file name, but by file content?

[vision media [ Tj Holowaychuk ]]

that part doesn't matter so much, we can just mine the component.json files every day or two and then provide a little express app for the search

[silvinci]

Sounds good!

Sometimes I feel like I owe you money for all your work. :D

[Jérémy Lal]

Two little remarks, there :

* relying on github is relying on a central service

* bower installs git url, their rely on a central service to have an index, too

I think we all know a better way to index files : search engines. That and a

little scraping might do wonders. That would still be a central service, though.

Jérémy.

[vision media [ Tj Holowaychuk ]]

we dont rely on github, it's simple "a" end-point, besides even if that were the case, using github-style urls and direct file access is muuuuuuch faster than bower's technique

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to componentjs...@googlegroups.com.

[Jan Buschtöns]

I kinda regret opening that topic. Haha.
Now that I've used component for quite a while, I can only support
Tj's statements.
component is fast like it's on dope and it's not bound to GitHub like
npm is bound to its registry. There are some apps available that allow
you to put up your own private registry.

Jan Buschtöns

Am 25.01.2013 um 00:24 schrieb "vision media [ Tj Holowaychuk ]"
<t...@vision-media.ca>:

> nice.

[Jérémy Lal]

Why ? the comparison is interesting.
But since bower allows installs from a git repository directly
(or maybe i misread the docs ?) i don't understand how it is so
much different.

On 25/01/2013 07:46, Jan Buscht�ns wrote:
> I kinda regret opening that topic. Haha.
> Now that I've used component for quite a while, I can only support
> Tj's statements.
> component is fast like it's on dope and it's not bound to GitHub like
> npm is bound to its registry. There are some apps available that allow
> you to put up your own private registry.
>

> Jan Buscht�ns

[vision media [ Tj Holowaychuk ]]

Bower has a central repo like npm where you register the git portion, so there is always going to be collisions at that level, a fight for good names. In npm we've already exhausted pretty much every reasonable name in existence, now they're all silly and make no sense. Why couple on GIT when you can couple on regular file serving? That's much easier to set up than a GIT server, and ~8x faster. Bower could have effectively been:

curl http://wherever-bower-repos-are.com | grep underscore | xargs git clone

aka it doesn't really do anything, just a repo of some urls, which is fine, maybe that works well for some people, but that's much different than what we're doing.

On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 11:31 PM, Jérémy Lal <hol...@gmail.com> wrote:

Why ? the comparison is interesting.
But since bower allows installs from a git repository directly
(or maybe i misread the docs ?) i don't understand how it is so
much different.

On 25/01/2013 07:46, Jan Buschtöns wrote:
> I kinda regret opening that topic. Haha.
> Now that I've used component for quite a while, I can only support
> Tj's statements.
> component is fast like it's on dope and it's not bound to GitHub like
> npm is bound to its registry. There are some apps available that allow
> you to put up your own private registry.
>

> Jan Buschtöns

>
> Am 25.01.2013 um 00:24 schrieb "vision media [ Tj Holowaychuk ]"
> <t...@vision-media.ca>:
>
>> nice.
>

[Ronan Berder]

That's pretty much how I felt after evaluating the various options. I couldn't believe that Bower was simply fetching repos and dumping them as is. Not much interest, especially when you've already played a bit with Component.

That being said, I've seen an increasingly large number of projects adopting their `component.json` format: any idea what their penetration is as of now? Is component/component holding well in comparison?

With jQuery moving in the same space (http://blog.jquery.com/2013/01/16/announcing-the-jquery-plugin-registry), despite its shortcomings (and more personally my near hatred for a good deal of jQuery-plugins-it-s-awesome-it-does-everything-just-edit-the-gazillion-settings (tm)), I am wondering how well Component will do among the larger crowd of front-end developers.

[vision media [ Tj Holowaychuk ]]

I think with Component it's just a matter of time, it'll be the slow one for sure, but the slow one that wins the race :) jQuery plugins are code-smell from the get-go so that's no concern, and bower is just bower doing things like we used to years ago

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to componentjs...@googlegroups.com.

[Dave Geddes]

One nice thing about Bower is that you can point to any resource (script, stylus mixin, etc) without that repo needing to add explicit support for Bower. Component's package manager could be considered a superset of Bower if features like that were implemented. 

[Tj]

Huh, you can do the same with component

Sent from my iPhone

[Yoshua Wuyts]

Are you sure of component winning the race? It seems as if bower has attracted more attention than component. Within my limited scope of understanding front-end package managers it seems to me as if bower is winning on adoption (4 times as many stars on github, if that's somewhat a metric to be considered). A problem I encountered when trying to research deeper into Bower vs Component was the naming; Bower is easy to find whereas Component doesn't automatically top my search results. Isn't it an idea to change the name to component.js or something? 

Also: currently the component.io site looks down from here; having a clear website like with Express could help gain traction. Having a clear overview of what Component does and adding a clear comparison to Bower within the FAQ would be fantastic.

EDIT: I noticed Component gets referred to as component(1), however I didn't notice it until after reading the FAQ. My point of "findability" still stands. 

EDIT: After re-reading the github page I noticed you refer to component as "component package manager", why not shorthand it to "CPM" which uses "components". Component(1) feels odd since the commands are "component". 

[vision media [ Tj Holowaychuk ]]

That's because it's twitter, people will follow anything of theirs even if it doesn't make sense. We dont even have a site yet, the whole system is still very alpha. Bower literally does pretty much nothing, and what it does do it could do much ~8x faster with different techniques. I mean we've been using jQuery plugins for how long? they never made any sense haha. The name is definitely a bit of an issue but as long as we have good resources on the site and in the readme I dont think that'll really be the end of the world.

[Yoshua Wuyts]

Just curious, any ETA on the site? 

[Jérémy Lal]

On 20/02/2013 23:37, Yoshua Wuyts wrote:
> Are you sure of component winning the race? It seems as if bower has
> attracted more attention than component. Within my limited scope of
> understanding front-end package managers it seems to me as if bower is
> winning on adoption (4 times as many stars on github, if that's somewhat a
> metric to be considered). A problem I encountered when trying to research
> deeper into Bower vs Component was the naming; Bower is easy to find
> whereas Component doesn't automatically top my search results. Isn't it an
> idea to change the name to component.js or something?

Using too generic a name for a binary is not a good idea.
I had a very painful experience of that last year, with the
"node" binary name...

J�r�my.

[vision media [ Tj Holowaychuk ]]

yeah im sure it'll evolve into "componentjs" or something just like node became "nodejs". The site should hopefully be up this weekend, void of some info though. For some reason the app is misbehaving on my linode, I have to look into that some more

Jérémy.

[yoshua wuyts]

Great to hear! 

Oh, this is something that I found on DailyJS just this morning: http://componentjs.com/. I can imagine this causing a lot of confusion if component.js would become the defacto name.

--
Yoshua Wuyts I  T (+31)6-31796821 I  Amsterdam   

yoshu...@gmail.com  I  LinkedIn I  Twitter

[vision media [ Tj Holowaychuk ]]

hahah yeahhh I contacted that guy when I saw it. He's the guy behind libpth and openssl, not exactly a web dev

[yoshua wuyts]

Nice site!