What are npm, bower, gulp, Yeoman, and grunt good for?

Question

I\'m a backend developer, and slightly confused by npm, bower, gulp, grunt, and Yeoman. Whenever I ask someone what their purpose is, the answer tends to boil down to depend

Answer 1

1. Gulp vs Grunt: Gulp provides more flexibility with task automation, Grunt comes built in with a lot of functionality as per the common development practices. There are two main differences between Grunt and Gulp:

   • Grunt focuses on configuration, while Gulp focuses on code
   • Grunt was built around a set of built-in, and commonly used tasks, while Gulp came around with the idea of enforcing nothing, but how community-developed micro-tasks should connect to each other Read here

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2. NodeJS: It is a Non-blocking server-side scripting language. Which means operations won't block further execution until current operation finishes.

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3. Git: As you mentioned it is an SCM tool, a widely used one. As per the GitHub docs it is different from other SCM tools as data is never deleted.

   Git thinks of its data more like a set of snapshots of a mini filesystem. Every time you commit, or save the state of your project in Git, it basically takes a picture of what all your files look like at that moment and stores a reference to that snapshot.

   When you do actions in Git, nearly all of them only add data to the Git database. It is very difficult to get the system to do anything that is not undoable or to make it erase data in any way. As in any VCS, you can lose or mess up changes you haven’t committed yet; but after you commit a snapshot into Git, it is very difficult to lose, especially if you regularly push your database to another repository.

   Read More

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4. Bower vs NPM : Bower and NPM are dependency managers but Bower modules are for front-end development. NPM is a huge collection of modules to be used with NodeJS backend. This SO answer covers it better