Re:Hard-won lessons: Five years with Node.js
by cookiecaper on Thursday April 20, 2017 @01:43PM
(#14158972)
Not sure what your other experience is, but most dynamic languages have simple package management platforms similar to npm. As you note, Java has Maven/Ant and C# has NuGet, both of which are substantially more "enterprisey".
It'd be interesting to hear a fair, modern comparison between npm, ruby-gems, LuaRocks, pip/PyPI/cheeseshop, and the other big ones I'm sure I'm forgetting.
The JavaScript community has had a lot of competitors on this front, particularly for frontend asset management, but it does finally seem to stabilizing a little bit. It took forever.
A "Battle of the dependency managers" if you will .. sounds great!
I mentioned NPM in particular in the context of this being a node.js discussion. I've seen a few comparable tools in my time but IMHO NPM may be one of the cleanest, considering this as a feature of node.js - it does add to its attractiveness as a development environment.
Yeah it took the JS community ages to sort this out, but in NPM there seems to be an answer.
This, was actually one of the things I liked most about Node.js - npm allows a developer to specify all dependencies (`pacakage.json`), versioned, similarly to maven but not as clunky. I was able to get up to speed project very quickly and easily using just `npm install`. I had one or two versioning issues to iron out, but the advice it provides about what is broken and where was very helpful.