How do Bower and NPM couple together?

Question

So to preface my question, I'm coming from a Java back-end developer perspective, where we use Maven to build. I have worked on testing on a server-side Node project we recently developed, but now I'm moving on to setting up testing on our front-end JavaScript client. I'm not very well-versed in front-end development and this is really my first foray into that.

All that being said, I'm thinking I'm going to use the following technology stack for our front-end testing: Eclipse IDE, Maven build process, Mocha testing framework, Chai assertion framework, Nock HTTP mocking framework, Sinon mocking/spying/stubbing framework, Rewire dependency injection framework. That all should be fine, and since that's the stack we use for our Node project, I would like to keep the front-end setup as similar as possible.

So, this is where my knowledge breaks down, though. I cannot seem to understand the difference in dependency management between our Node project and our front-end JavaScript project. I cannot see why I would not continue to use NPM, integrated into our Maven build, to handle dependency management and installation.

I see many people advocating Bower, but after looking at its page and docs, I still am not seeing what niche it fills that NPM would not. I am seeing a lot of adamant rejection of NPM insofar as browser dependency management goes; the main reasoning being that NPM is designed for server-side Node projects, and not for the front-end space. But who cares? Regardless of its initial design's intentions, if it does what I need it to do, where is the downside?

Please approach this "question" as if I am a complete newbie. I have realized as I've gone through this process and research, that I have very large dearths of knowledge in regards to the front-end side of things. With that being said, be as specific and thorough as possible in your answers, please. I would be happy to share project configuration and such, as needed, in order to help paint a picture of the space I'm in. Thanks for any feedback!

Answer 1

Bower and NPM do work differently.

NPM is very powerful and great at what it does. However, you won't find many client-side packages in there; most of them are there because they work in Node too. (For example, Underscore.JS and the JADE template engine.)

That's why you have Bower, which has the majority of the client-side packages. It has many jQuery plugins, templating engines, CSS frameworks, etc. Don't expect to find such packages in NPM.

You can work fine with both. I do so. :)