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

Solution 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

Solution 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?