Pulldown vs Bower, which is for you.

Recently Jack Franklin of JavaScript Playground and Tom Ashworth created Pulldown and it is pretty sweet. Now there is no better information on Pulldown vs Bower than the information in the projects README.md, I just wanted to quickly look at how you might start using one of the two today.

Both Bower and Pulldown are package managers. Meaning they allow you a quicker faster way of grabbing any dependencies you might need for a project. Rather then going to the jquery site and getting the source then coping and pasting it into a blank document and saving it from there. These two tools allow you to run simple commands and POOF, you have what you need.

Examples:

Bower:

bower install jquery

Pulldown:

pulldown jquery

They both look very similar, but the output is quite a bit different. Bower will create a bower_components directory and store all of your dependancies in folders with in there. Like Grunt’s package.json Bower can use a bower.json file where running bower install will install all listed dependencies in that file. Something like this is great for large projects with lots of dependencies, instead of committing all of these to your source control, you simply commit the bower.json and anyone new to the project can get what they need.

Pulldown on the other hand is the:

Minimalist package manager – quickly grab a copy of your favourite library.

It is great for simple projects, or mock-ups you might be working on. A great place to use it would be if your team does not use something like Bower. Using this is a super low friction point, as only you can use it to get what you need faster, the whole team does not have to commit to a new tool. The output from Pulldown is much simpler as well, instead of creating a folder structure, it simply places the file you ask for in the current directory your shell in is. This essentially lets you speed up prototyping or simple project scaffolding.

I have found that I use Pulldown quite a bit, as it does not make sense for my current team to move to something like Bower for package management, at this point it is a tool to help me speed up my workflow. And that is all I can really ask for!

More information for both of these tools can be found on their sites. Bower, Pulldown