Is angular-seed the de-facto empty project to start with?

Question

After having been convinced to learn and use Angular.js, I was going to start a concrete web UI application so as to launch the learning wheel of experience. ( The app is going to be some kind of personal planning, to do list, reminder, pomodoro technique oriented, and so on...)

One of the tutorial videos I have seen, by the author of Angular, is about best practices. And one of the best practices is to start with the angular-seed project.

That is what I was going to do, but after googling a little, there are already at least two other projects that claim to be the good starting point:

• angular-enterprise-seed
• angular-sprout

I'm beginner, but I like to invest in the long term. Should I worry about using something else than angular-seed ? I feel like it's too early to ask myself this question, but if there are already two other projects, maybe there are some good reasons.

Answer 1

I've found that though many people use various seed projects, the easiest & most consistent starting point for an angular app (or any javascript web app) is Yeoman.

This app is a scaffolding tool that allows you to specify generators which will build the up the kernel of your application, complete with whatever libraries you desire (via bower) and a working grunt build file (most generators come stock with a build task, server task for live editing, and testing task)

Though an app like this is necessarily opinionated, the scaffolding it produces is still very generic.

example:

mkdir my-app cd my-app npm install generator-angular npm install generator-karma yo angular 

Answer 2

They all have different merits so it depends on what you are looking to do. I wrote angular-enterprise-seed and can speak to its relative merits.

1. It is server-agnostic. This is important since a core tenet of AngularJS, and one of many things that make it attractive, is that it follows the Client MVC paradigm. This means it is entirely decoupled from any and all server technologies. Many existing seeds tie AngularJS to server technologies, such as angular-sprout (NodeJS) or grilled-feta (Google App Engine/Java). In the case of the aforementioned projects, if NodeJS and/or Java environments aren't already on your system, then you will have to go through several hoops just to see the seed come up. This can be alienating to PHP and Python developers, which results in limiting the project's community.

2. Up and running in seconds. Because it is server-agnostic, it can be run in any container (heck the filesystem for that matter). Suggested method is running "python -m SimpleHTTPServer" from the root directory -- this comes native on Mac and Linux so there are no additional steps.

3. Live preview. It's cheap to check on status of the project because a live version is always hosted on github. Because it's server agnostic, this is automatically done by copying master to the gh-pages branch from a cron job.

4. Rich styling. It includes Twitter Bootstrap and custom/buildable LESS out of the box, along with Angular-UI, Angular-NG, fonts, and a myriad of other tools to provide rich styling and responsiveness capabilities.

5. Widgets. Like Angular-Seed and Angular-Sprout, Angular-Enterprise-Seed exemplifies "best practice" layout, routing, etc. But it also provides a host of pre-built components that can be taken off the shelf and immediately reused. This is a bit difficult to do as it can require the convergence of several technologies. For example, to create the grid example, I combined angular-ui, angular-ng, angular-js, and jquery styling. There are component examples for modals, pagination, alerts, grids, and more.

Angular-seed is great as an academic exercise if you want to learn how the pieces work, but it will leave you longing for a more substantial jump-off point.

I haven't used angular-sprout so I can't speak to its merits. Maybe there is some room to merge angular-sprout and angular-enterprise-seed?