What is the relationship between generator-angular and generator-angular-fullstack?

Question

I am writing this comparison to help people make some sense of all this nonsense and at the moment, it just looks like generator-angular's benefits and value are a subset of what you get with generator-angular-fullstack. I filled this stuff in myself and I'm no expert, so it is most likely full of dubious factuality.

But it's been passed around a lot and nobody has cried foul yet, so maybe it's correct. If so, that would lead to the logical conclusion that one should just always use generator-angular-fullstack and delete the backend parts if one doesn't need them. But this can't be the case since many people are still using generator-angular. I see that generator-angular-fullstack was forked from generator-angular, but then what?

I think I must be missing something. What does generator-angular give people that generator-angular-fullstack doesn't?

Answer 1

I've used both generators for a bit now, choosing one over the other really depends on whether you need the backend code to provide you with data processing / session management or an API interface.

generator-angular

• Official Yeoman generator, this means it's maintained by the yeoman team.
• Is more suitable for creating just the client side code
• It's subgenerators only create client side components (angular controllers, routes and views)
• Does not have deployment generators, but a simple procfile goes a long way.

generator-angular-fullstack

• Is a fork from generator-angular by DaftMonk
• Is suitable to quickly start a fully fledged application
• Makes use of socket.io for quick data binds between server/clients
• It's subgenerators create client and server side code (API endpoints, models and even deployment configurations for Heroku and Openshift)
• The tests are much more thorough, makes use of PhantomJS, Karma and Protractor
• When starting a new project, you can add session and user management via OpenAuth providers like Google/Facebook/Twitter without any hassles or you can use your database schema to store your user's data.

Both

• Generate javascript or coffeescript versions for the frontend code only.
• Provide build scripts to safely minify. (Angular easily breaks under minification)
• Can be easily tested by grunt test
• Use grunt as the task runner
• Are deeply integrated with Bower, and adding dependencies is easy as pie. (fullstack's tests configuration needs to be updated though.)
• Generate a distribution directory with all files minified.
• Are single page applications, there is only one index.html file and the routes are all done with angular's $location

Demos

• Here's an example of a generator-angular:
  http://commitr.herokuapp.com/
• And here's a generator-angular-fullstack app I'm building right now:
  http://protected-shelf-3830.herokuapp.com/

Answer 2

I am building a generator-ember-fullstack.

The main reason i started this is, at first i wanted a full stack environment.

First step is to build the project workflow. I choose gulp and started a project template.

Then it grow, then i decided to add scaffolding, and i ended up working on generator-ember-fullstack.

The main decision for building generator-ember-fullstack was to have a full stack environment, this includes server side scaffolding as well as client side.

And i really didn't like grunt-connect plugin that basically fires up a fake server to serve your app. I needed a project that had single commands for build and deploy.

I didn't know what to do with public folder that produces with grunt build.command.

And with ember there is ember-cli which is generator-ember on steroids. Again it lacks the server side and it's too customized.

But ofcourse generator-ember-fullstack only supports nodejs on server side. Which is perfect for me.