bpm - browser packager manager

bpm is a system for managing resource dependencies for client-side browser applications. It is inspired by npm, but has better support for the unique needs of browser applications including:

• Supports multiple module loaders (i.e. you can choose RequireJS, spade or even no loader at all)
• Handles non-JS assets such as CSS and images. (Support for SCSS/Sass coming soon)
• Can autocompile other languages such as CoffeeScript.

bpm also implements a basic build system that generates cache-optimized assets.

Finally, bpm is based on the rubygems library. Although you don't need to know any ruby to use bpm, this means that we also benefit from nearly 10 years of lessons learned to jump start bpm.

Once you have bpm installed (see below), create a demo app like so:

bpm new my_app
cd my_app

Then add jquery as a dependency:

bpm add jquery

This will create a file called assets/bpm_libs which will include jquery. You can then create an index.html and reference that js. Everytime you add a dependency, it will be based into this JS file .

Note that there is also a CSS file at assets/bpm_styles.css - we do the same thing there.

When we release, bpm will be available via PKG and MSI installers as well as via rubygems. For now the best way to try bpm is to clone it from github and then:

bundle install

From the directory. (If you don't have bundler, you will need ruby 1.9.2 installed and type gem install bundler to get it.)

Alpha. You should be able to work the basic system, but some features are still incomplete including:

• SASS and other CSS plugins
• Format plugins (i.e. CoffeeScript)
• Minification plugins
• lots of other stuff I am forgetting
• node support - you will eventually be able to run JS that doesn't require the DOM in node. We've prototyped this but it needs to be polished still.