Hey guys - project creator here. Would love to get any and all feedback - this project has been my passion for over a year and I'm super excited to finally release it!
In that case please consider redoing your videos with more care. Both the audio and video are poor. Your microphone should be near your mouth so that you don't sound like you're far away and the video resolution is really low.
I know, I definitely need to do a better job with the videos. I just did them this morning (wasn't planning on having them but i thought it might be a good idea) and vimeo really murdered me on the resolution, not sure why. I'll have new ones up soon, promise : )
On a related note, I'm currently using Grunt.JS with few plugins for Compass, CoffeeScript and Live Reload. Similar to Guards (ruby based), it's the plugin ecosystem that makes it valuable and able to suit multiple needs.
Mimosa author here! I'll work on the website. =) I do think the tool is better documented than some of the others, and I was really going for having the docs rather than making them super pretty.
Mimosa is very pluggable (http://mimosajs.com/modules.html), moreso than Brunch, but slightly less so than grunt, though, to be honest, my grunt experience is slim. That said, grunt obviously has quite the ecosystem of plugins that all the others lack.
HackerNews commenting n00b, but guessing it only lets replies go so deep? Hence my reply to the site suggestions goes here. =)
Crazy kinds of awesome to get that kind of feedback! I'll take a look at all that stuff. Big site update content-wise with my next release and I can make some changes then.
Hacker News has exponential delay time on comments based on depth. So the deeper a comment is, the longer you have to wait to reply to it. It's supposed to help cool off flamewars.
Your site definitely looks slick! I'd take any suggestions anyone has and as long as they make sense, implement them. I'd rather be writing node than thinking about design anyway. =)
I will admit that this is a rather opinionated framework. I'm kind of shooting for the apple philosophy - reduce flexibility for a lighter and more beautiful product. I've worked with a lot of compiled languages and for me, these are the cleanest and easiest to work with. I did try to build in a bit of flex though with the plugin interface and the fact that it compiles html, css, js, and ejs in addition out of the box.
Meteor is not the same type of project as roots at all, so this comparison doesn't exactly make sense. Although meteor is an awesome project and in addition is backed by at least 3 people working on it full time : )
Cool project. Also, you should checkout Punch (http://laktek.github.com/punch). I like it mainly for the JSON based content definitions, which is really helpful when it comes to prototyping web apps.
This is really nice and a great way to rapidly build without resorting to templates or bootstrap. Highly polished, great work.
We released something built on the same stack (jade, stylus, coffeescript) that's a bit more lightweight, more geared towards building prototypes called [proto](https://github.com/droptype/proto). Because it's focused on building small prototypes, it saves everything to gists and provides a viewer at http://proto.es/{gist-id}.
Thanks so much! I really appreciate it. Proto looks like top quality stuff - excellent work. I'm going to check this out in depth - perhaps our tools can learn something from each other or combine in some way : )
That would be fantastic. As I said, root is very highly polished and you've done a great job. We have something in the pipeline that might make sense to collaborate on. Will shoot you an email to discuss.
Sorry for being unclear. On the video you recommended using ftp to transfer the pub folder over to the web server for go live. It's best to recommend a tool that operates on an encrypted ssh transport like sftp/scp/etc.
I made a plugin interface just for things like adding typescript support. I know pretty much nothing about typescript through, are there any good node compilers out there? It would be incredible if you made a plugin for it - if not I'd be happy to try to tinker one together myself.
p.s. I would add a tweet button on the site, I actively looked for it, although I'm lazy I tweeted anyway, but this might give you some extra shout-outs, especially for the shot grace period you are on HN front page
It looks like roots is using Bower to manage client-side packages. Bower is Twitter's "front-end JavaScript" package manager. Bower does indeed manage and track dependencies for you, see http://twitter.github.com/bower/
Haha was very prepared for this question. The main differences for me are that roots doesn't rely on ruby, it's built for advanced devs (starts with jade, stylus, and coffeescript), it uses roots-css rather than compass, and the project structure is a bit lighter and cleaner.
I tried yeoman and played with it for a while when it came out, but for me it feels vastly different to actually use. The concepts are definitely similar though. Great question!
I very much appreciated the run-this-remote-file | sh installer method before I learned what I was actually opening myself up to. As handy as it is, this practice really should be discouraged, imho.
I get that, but what if you recently ran sudo make-me-a-sandwich in that shell session? If someone maliciously slipped a sudo command in that script they'd have everything they needed, and you might not even realize it. Obviously, I'm not suggesting the authors of these tools, but these remote shell installers seem like they'd be obvious targets for Bad Hackers.
It seems like the whole point of these remote shell installers is to make it easier for some people, but some might not be aware of this risk.
Yes, and they should drop the pipe to bash/sh at the end of the curl command. Download it, read it, then manually run it, don't just pipe it all together.
Fair enough. This is why I have explicit instructions on how to install without the run-as-remote-file install method right above it. Do you think it would help to add a view source link next to it or something?
Personally since node is the only real dependency, I'd just use the npm installer. I didn't mean to discourage the work you put in, by the way. I might be using this tomorrow, but today is the christmas party.
If you check the source, really this is all the script does. It checks to see if you have node, and if you do it runs npm install roots -g. But this is good feedback and if other people feel the same I'll definitely swap out the one-command installer. Have fun at the christmas party!
I think the reason is because this isn't a code-based library, it's a command line client. The portion that is more code-based (the css library) is chock full of code examples, and all the commands are listed out on the front page.
After looking it over, what kinds of other code examples would you want to see?
For sure. I do work mainly on backend dev, and the roots-rails and roots-express plugins help me out a decent amount. Roots specifically is targeted to front-end though. If you have any suggestions on how to tie this together nicely with backend stuff I'd be more than happy to hear it though!
My biggest thing right now is getting the livereload to work with rails, specifically through pow. I'm sure there's a way to do it, just have to figure it out...
Looks great! I've been using yeoman for a while now and this looks like a fantastic replacement / alternative. Are you looking for contributions or just releasing this for people to use?
Both! Any and all contributions are more than welcome. I don't know what the eff I'm doing. This works great for me, but if I can make it better for everyone else I'm all about that. I'll continue to work hard on this until it's the best it can be.
I wasn't implying anything. Some people like having a unique name so I was just letting him know another Roots existed. Ultimately the author's choice if he cares enough to rename it or not.
This seems comparable to Fire.app (http://fireapp.handlino.com/, F/LOSS, my favorite) or CodeKit. I noticed that you are specifically pimping out Stylus rather than Sass/Compass, but it doesn't seem to be a problem to get Compass working if you copy the library in yourself.
for sure, this was what i was aiming for. if i were better at cocoa dev i would have made a little mac app too.
I pimped out stylus and avoided sass/compass for very specific reasons. try using the roots-css library and let me know what you think. I'm hoping people find it to be a refreshing change of pace - the syntax is natural, extensive, and includes ui components.
Will do. I've heard people on Freenode IRC telling me that while Compass is a great library, Stylus is the superior language. I certainly was a fan of Sass over SCSS, and I like how Stylus reminds me of that.
For sure. I actually built roots on top of sass originally, and I became frustrated with it's limitations. I tried porting it to stylus because that was the only viable alternative that I knew of, and once I started working with it I couldn't go back.
The only drawback to stylus is that sometimes you can get caught with ambiguity. But I've tried to make roots so that if you are just starting, you deal with that as little as possible.
I prefer using mixins over extend, as they are more flexible and intelligent. If you don't structure your classes correctly it can lead to some code duplication, but frankly this doesn't make any speed difference after gzip anyway.
To respond to your edit, stylus is as good at including mixins as sass. it's a lot less verbose in fact. you just run it as a function.
The placeholder selectors are the one thing stylus does not have. I'd like to see if I can build that in and send a pull request at some point. But for a library like this I need flex and intelligence which means i'll be using mixins over placeholders anyway.
Are people using this/Brunch/Yeoman inside Rails apps? I can't work out the usecase - or do you use this in conjunction with a separate app generating your API?
Thanks so much! Really appreciate it. I am a backend dev and spend much of my time in rails (as you can probably tell from the way this project was written), so I very specifically built this to work with rails. I have a plugin here (https://github.com/jenius/roots-rails) that's working, but still tinkering with it. More than happy to accept contributions as well!
Cool project - one of the major pain points with Yeoman was trying to get templating working. Cool to see a project which takes this approach from the beginning.
Great job OP. Would love to see something that merges aspects from this and Yeoman. I feel like (haven't officially tried either TBH) they focus on slightly different aspects and would really cover full stack very very well.
Again, Great job!
Make some simple HTML components, break out the compiled HTML and CSS for non-developers, and you've got yourself a bootstrap alternative. Please, make it happen.
I made it my specific goal not to have this as a bootstrap alternate - there's already boostrap and foundation - why do we need more? In addition, I'm very much against using classes to dry up your css. You should be using mixins or extends to build object-oriented css - that's the principle that roots css is built upon.
Rather than catering to non-developers, I like to encourage people to learn more about development so they can write clean code and make beautiful sites. If that means less adoption, so be it - at least I won't be polluting the web with poorly built sites : )
That being said, this is open source, so if that's something you want to work on, you are more than welcome!
Since I'm a dev I would never use a compiled version of such a framework, but having adoption by non-devs would benefit the community and create a market for devs to create things for.
I wouldn't think of it as catering to them but creating an easier on-boarding process.
Ok, i see what you're saying. That is the exact mission of this library (https://github.com/jenius/roots-css) which is behind roots. I would love any help or advice on making this go where you imagine it can. Hit me up via email or twitter and let's talk about it!
As a developer, I don't quite get who this is for. I know these technologies and how to use them and install them. Installing node.js and stuff is also pretty much a couple of one liners.
I guess I don't see why others find much pain in installing node or rails... I already have Ruby/Node and other stuff installed and each new project I create differs in file structures and stuff like that based on the needs of the project. Different projects require different stacks.
Hi - I'm a developer too, full time, and I'm the one who made this so I guess I should be the one explaining it. Roots is for front-end devs or devs who do front-end work. It makes doing front-end work blazing fast and much less repetitive.
As for your comment on making it yourself, I would urge you to go check out the github repo (https://github.com/jenius/roots). I can assure you that replicating this environment is not something that can be done with a couple lines of npm install xxx - there is a lot of code under the hood. I've spent more than a year on and off working on this. The command line client is fast, simple, and intuitive. The css library is extensive and extremely powerful. I built this tool for developers to make life quicker and easier when it comes to front-end dev.
Give it a shot, and if you still think it would be more convenient to roll your own, email me and maybe I can take a few tips from you on how to continue improving roots to make it more useful for developers : )
Thanks so much for leaving feedback - really appreciate it. It helps a lot, and thanks so much for your kind words as well. Just out of curiosity, why would you prefer sass and haml? Have you tried stylus and jade? If not, you should give them a shot!
You're definitely right that there are a lot of alternatives - I just think roots is the best. If there are any other features that you can see as helpful, by all means let me know and I'd love to try to integrate them!
Thank you! Yeah, you can absolutely use plain js. You can just drop a plain js file in there and delete the coffeescript - everything should still compile perfectly.
If you want to use basic html, css, and js, you can use the flag --basic to the end of a roots new command : )
But yeah I'm thinking some option for custom default templates might be nice to add, now that you bring this up. Also, try coffeescript! It's great, promise
You won't regret it. Just give yourself a week or so to get used to it - it seems frustrating at first when you make syntax errors, but it is a life saver in the long run
This looks interesting, I've been doing a lot similar work as I'm currently building an open source CMS for nodejs. It's a lot more complex than Roots however the goal of the project is to make it easy for developers to build websites and applications. It'll come with a full featured and extendable admin control panel and built in support for all the common stuff like authentication, user Management, content management, blog posts, asset publishing, etc.
The nodejs side handles the API which automatically generates REST routes for your resources, and you have the ability to write custom API endpoints as well.
The website and admin panel are automatically built using Grunt and require.js and depend only on the API so you're free to host your website on S3 or another server entirely. The client-side website will call the API for content, authentication, etc. The admin panel is written in AngularJS (So far it's incredibly responsive and feels almost native!) and it's up to the user what to use for the main website.
One nice thing is during development it'll watch your files for changes, rebuild the site on the fly and update the client view using socket.io. No more constantly refreshing the page after every change! In production mode everything is bundled and minified using r.js.
If this sounds interesting to you guys then I should have something to show HN in the next few weeks :)
Sounds like a cool project - excited to see it for sure. The tough part with projects like this is making sure that it's simple but still flexible. For example, can you fully customize the rest routes, or are those just generated? If a developer knows enough to work with routing, models, and the back end, why wouldn't they just use rails and activeadmin for the admin panel? If your project is any less simple/flexible than rails, that will be a tough compromise.
Either way, this sounds like a pretty sweet project, I'd love to check it out when it's released. What are you thinking about calling it (just so i recognize)?
I completely agree with your points. I constantly encounter the same problems when I use other frameworks so I want everything to be fully flexible.
At the moment the REST routes are generated for resources and available through the api/resources endpoint. (For example, /api/resources/users/) you can however add whatever other routes you like to /api/ using your own controllers.
I'm thinking about adding a simple query language to the REST route syntax to take care of some common requests. That may work something like this: /api/resources/users/$near/lat,lon
It's still early stages though so I'll probably go through a lot of ideas before I'm happy with it!
It'll be called Nails (or Nails Framework, Nails CMS, whatever sounds closest to the finished idea) - I have the domain nails.io which I'll be using for this project.
Cheers. I've used RailwayJS in the past but I switched to LocomotiveJS[1] which I find much nicer to work with and it's incredibly flexible too.
I'm using locomotive in this project on top of express to help with controllers and routing, though I'm thinking about using flatiron[2] which is a pretty solid looking set of modules for routing, middleware, etc.
116 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 170 ms ] threadAlso, this website is open source in addition to the project. It's here on github: https://github.com/jenius/roots.cx
http://mimosajs.com/
http://brunch.io/
----
On a related note, I'm currently using Grunt.JS with few plugins for Compass, CoffeeScript and Live Reload. Similar to Guards (ruby based), it's the plugin ecosystem that makes it valuable and able to suit multiple needs.
Needless to say, roots sounds interesting.
Mimosa seems less opinionated, supports everything. Has modules. Ugly website.
Brunch seems less opinionated, supports everything. Has skeletons, plugin API. Nice website.
Grunt seems like the roll-your-own option and is probably more well supported than the others...?
Mimosa is very pluggable (http://mimosajs.com/modules.html), moreso than Brunch, but slightly less so than grunt, though, to be honest, my grunt experience is slim. That said, grunt obviously has quite the ecosystem of plugins that all the others lack.
– The text shadows on the main page are a bit much. 1px offset is sufficient and the shadow color probably doesn't need to be so light.
– Grey boxes around text are too tight and probably shouldn't be so rounded.
– Headers on home-page are either too big or aren't given enough space. Whitespace! Don't be afraid to use it.
– Darker shadows on headers have the same problem – too much offset – just looks tacky.
– Title and description on homepage looks crammed into the top. Give it more space. Maybe smaller text.
– Red headers are way too bright. Tone it down.
– The bathroom-tile background image is kind of weird.
– Body text is too wide throughout the docs.
– More whitespace throughout the design would help (between all typographic elements), especially given your choice of a large, open typeface.
Crazy kinds of awesome to get that kind of feedback! I'll take a look at all that stuff. Big site update content-wise with my next release and I can make some changes then.
We released something built on the same stack (jade, stylus, coffeescript) that's a bit more lightweight, more geared towards building prototypes called [proto](https://github.com/droptype/proto). Because it's focused on building small prototypes, it saves everything to gists and provides a viewer at http://proto.es/{gist-id}.
Regards
as for feedback:
* would love it if you'll add TypeScript support somehow. I come from the Java / Scala world and it will be an easier transition to node dev this way
* best download to launch-in-browser sequence Iv'e seen yet. (roots create foo, cd foo, roots watch) browser actually opens for you, nice touch.
* you seem to put a lot of effort on usability and convenience, please continue.
* good documentation and usage print-outs
* the js client side package manager is a great addition, any dependency management there?
I made a plugin interface just for things like adding typescript support. I know pretty much nothing about typescript through, are there any good node compilers out there? It would be incredible if you made a plugin for it - if not I'd be happy to try to tinker one together myself.
Will give it a shot :)
p.s. I would add a tweet button on the site, I actively looked for it, although I'm lazy I tweeted anyway, but this might give you some extra shout-outs, especially for the shot grace period you are on HN front page
I tried yeoman and played with it for a while when it came out, but for me it feels vastly different to actually use. The concepts are definitely similar though. Great question!
It seems like the whole point of these remote shell installers is to make it easier for some people, but some might not be aware of this risk.
Looks pretty good for the rest btw.
Hope that helps.
After looking it over, what kinds of other code examples would you want to see?
Reading the introduction about express.js i (don't know why) expected more glue magic between frontend and backend.
My biggest thing right now is getting the livereload to work with rails, specifically through pow. I'm sure there's a way to do it, just have to figure it out...
One suggestion: After I looked over the installer script, I tried running this on my Arch machine and it didn't recognize `open`.
Depending on the platform, you may want to check for `xdg-open` as well.
* https://github.com/retlehs/roots
* http://www.rootstheme.com/
I pimped out stylus and avoided sass/compass for very specific reasons. try using the roots-css library and let me know what you think. I'm hoping people find it to be a refreshing change of pace - the syntax is natural, extensive, and includes ui components.
The only drawback to stylus is that sometimes you can get caught with ambiguity. But I've tried to make roots so that if you are just starting, you deal with that as little as possible.
- native css-style syntax for mixins
- ability to pull properties from a parent (killer)
- better programming logic and syntax
- runs nicely on javascript and ruby
- you can use brackets and semis or not without switching languages, and you can mix the two types of syntax
- easy to build libraries for and import libraries into
EDIT: sorry, I meant @include: http://sass-lang.com/docs/yardoc/file.SASS_REFERENCE.html#in...
http://learnboost.github.com/stylus/docs/extend.html
edit: You're right, @include's support for mixin bodies is not available :/ I am hoping Stylus adds this soon. It helps a lot for media queries.
To respond to your edit, stylus is as good at including mixins as sass. it's a lot less verbose in fact. you just run it as a function.
@extend, @include, % placeholder selectors.
But I take your point about gzipping and from what I've read redundant CSS has a negligible effect on site performance.
Have you seen node-webkit[1]? You can easily create a cross-platform app with HTML5/NodeJS capabilities.
[1] https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit
Sidenote: the design is gorgeous.
Rather than catering to non-developers, I like to encourage people to learn more about development so they can write clean code and make beautiful sites. If that means less adoption, so be it - at least I won't be polluting the web with poorly built sites : )
That being said, this is open source, so if that's something you want to work on, you are more than welcome!
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893514
Since I'm a dev I would never use a compiled version of such a framework, but having adoption by non-devs would benefit the community and create a market for devs to create things for.
I wouldn't think of it as catering to them but creating an easier on-boarding process.
P.S. It seems the link to the SASS plugin on your site is broken.
I guess I don't see why others find much pain in installing node or rails... I already have Ruby/Node and other stuff installed and each new project I create differs in file structures and stuff like that based on the needs of the project. Different projects require different stacks.
As for your comment on making it yourself, I would urge you to go check out the github repo (https://github.com/jenius/roots). I can assure you that replicating this environment is not something that can be done with a couple lines of npm install xxx - there is a lot of code under the hood. I've spent more than a year on and off working on this. The command line client is fast, simple, and intuitive. The css library is extensive and extremely powerful. I built this tool for developers to make life quicker and easier when it comes to front-end dev.
Give it a shot, and if you still think it would be more convenient to roll your own, email me and maybe I can take a few tips from you on how to continue improving roots to make it more useful for developers : )
I would prefer sass and haml honestly. Other then that, I love how you make those mixins that seem very useful and I can see myself using it.
Videos are very good and show what are main features.
Thanks so much for leaving feedback - really appreciate it. It helps a lot, and thanks so much for your kind words as well. Just out of curiosity, why would you prefer sass and haml? Have you tried stylus and jade? If not, you should give them a shot!
You're definitely right that there are a lot of alternatives - I just think roots is the best. If there are any other features that you can see as helpful, by all means let me know and I'd love to try to integrate them!
On a side note, I can totally see myself using this. So, cheers!
But yeah I'm thinking some option for custom default templates might be nice to add, now that you bring this up. Also, try coffeescript! It's great, promise
The scrollspy-esque navigation bar on the left never highlights the animation link, whether you click it or scroll all the way down.
I'm using: Chrome 23.0.1271.95 on OSX 10.8.2.
The nodejs side handles the API which automatically generates REST routes for your resources, and you have the ability to write custom API endpoints as well.
The website and admin panel are automatically built using Grunt and require.js and depend only on the API so you're free to host your website on S3 or another server entirely. The client-side website will call the API for content, authentication, etc. The admin panel is written in AngularJS (So far it's incredibly responsive and feels almost native!) and it's up to the user what to use for the main website.
One nice thing is during development it'll watch your files for changes, rebuild the site on the fly and update the client view using socket.io. No more constantly refreshing the page after every change! In production mode everything is bundled and minified using r.js.
If this sounds interesting to you guys then I should have something to show HN in the next few weeks :)
Sounds like a cool project - excited to see it for sure. The tough part with projects like this is making sure that it's simple but still flexible. For example, can you fully customize the rest routes, or are those just generated? If a developer knows enough to work with routing, models, and the back end, why wouldn't they just use rails and activeadmin for the admin panel? If your project is any less simple/flexible than rails, that will be a tough compromise.
Either way, this sounds like a pretty sweet project, I'd love to check it out when it's released. What are you thinking about calling it (just so i recognize)?
I completely agree with your points. I constantly encounter the same problems when I use other frameworks so I want everything to be fully flexible.
At the moment the REST routes are generated for resources and available through the api/resources endpoint. (For example, /api/resources/users/) you can however add whatever other routes you like to /api/ using your own controllers.
I'm thinking about adding a simple query language to the REST route syntax to take care of some common requests. That may work something like this: /api/resources/users/$near/lat,lon
It's still early stages though so I'll probably go through a lot of ideas before I'm happy with it!
It'll be called Nails (or Nails Framework, Nails CMS, whatever sounds closest to the finished idea) - I have the domain nails.io which I'll be using for this project.
Cheers!
I'm using locomotive in this project on top of express to help with controllers and routing, though I'm thinking about using flatiron[2] which is a pretty solid looking set of modules for routing, middleware, etc.
[1] LocomotiveJS: http://locomotivejs.org/ [2] Flatiron: http://flatironjs.org/#data