Given that there were 14825158 downloads of lodash from npm last month, that implies that there were over 3M downloads from bower. That's a lot of people to throw under the bus.
According to bower stats over the last 7 days lodash was installed 23 times compared to 4 million npm downloads & 181 new npm packages depending on it.
After thinking about it a bit more, the only reasonable conclusion I can come to is the following:
It's the number of times users actually typed
bower install lodash
i.e. adding it to a project that didn't already have it, as opposed to just running bower install on a package which uses lodash.
Would also explain why despite bower itself being installed 37000 times in the last 7 days, the most installed package is only listed as 100 or so times.
It works a lot like NPM but is specifically intended for use with front-end modules.
Features:
- uses System.js (a polyfill for the future ES6-module-loader spec
- supports CommonJS, AMD, and UMD formats
- has plugins for importing other types (ex css)
- support Typescript/Traceur/Babel out of the box
- uses a flat dependency structure (ie like NPM v3)
- can generate bundles and self-executing bundles (incl tree shaking and minify)
- tracks specific versions of dependencies
Unlike NPM, module installation doesn't depend on packages published to a central registry. It can install versioned modules directly from GitHub and NPM. The registry it uses is nothing but GitHub repo with module-to-repo mappings and compatibility shims.
Its great with everything. Frontend / backend, etc. When I removed bower from our app last year, adopted Webpack and migrated everything over to NPM it dramatically simplified things.
Ah, that's good to know; I'd been sticking to Bower for Phoenix' front end stuff, might start looking at migrating them to NPM if Brunch support is stable now.
I think the thinking behind dropping the support is something like this:
I use browserify/webpack/node and npm is great. I wish more libs that I use were also on npm so that I wouldnt have to fork/shim them. How can I force other people to use npm? Maybe if I drop bower support for my awesome lib that everyone uses, other libs will follow suit, or perhaps the users will see the light and stop using bower because it sucks.
I loved bower and really preferred it in regard with npm for frontend modules. However more and more packages went to npm-only and we completely switched to npm for all.
Looking back, I am glad since it's just a nightmare to deal with dozens of package managers. Because bower was installed via npm, we had npm installed already and just skipped the bower part.
No, he has an objection to them dropping support for "bower", which is a package manager for javascript files. It does seem like a typo of "browser", so I can see where the confusion would come from.
