Yeoman: Modern Workflows for Modern Webapps

Front-end developers should take a note of the release of Yeoman, a front-end development workflow.

Yeoman was created to aid in both setting up a workflow for a new project as well as attempting to fix some of the larger problems facing front-end development, such as fragmented dependencies. It is developed by a team at Google as well as a team of external contributors; Its goal is to create an easy workflow for developers to use by acting as a wrapper around Grunt (a command line tool for automating development tasks) and Bower (a package manager for front-end assets including HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images).

To aid front-end developers in their work, Yeoman provides the following features:

• Fast Scaffolding: Yeoman has a generator-based architecture, which allows it to generate scaffolding for projects quickly using assets such as HTML5 boilerplate and Twitter bootstrap. Yeoman also supports the use of AMD modules using requireJS.
• CoffeeScript and Compass: The livereload process allows it to compile CoffeeScript as well as Compass files (SASS/SCSS) automatically during development.
• Package Management: Yeoman uses Twitter’s Bower package manager to handle asset and dependency management, allowing packages from Bower’s registry to be added to a project with just a couple of key strokes.
• Built-in Preview Server: A built in webserver allows quick previewing of a project without having to set up an external server.