When I saw Gulp for the first time and learned how you structure a Gulpfile I felt that it offered a much more intuitive and “easy to keep DRY” alternative to Grunt. This feeling was verified when I started to use it. When rewriting the functionality in generator-klei’s Gruntfile for Gulp, I was able to shave off half of the code right away, and it was easier to understand as well. Less code and more understandable code means less time consuming maintenance, which was just what we needed.

The idea of replacing Yeoman is born I was wondering, what if Yeoman could be replaced by something similar that was simpler, as well as being easier to write and maintain?

One way to be sure that you are using state of the art techniques is to use a scaffolding tool when building new apps/packages. With a scaffolding tool you can also get help when upgrading an existing project that has already been generated with the tool. The most popular scaffolding tool today is Yeoman and it has a huge amount of project generators. To save time when setting up new projects I decided to create a Yeoman generator of my own – generator-klei which is a MEAN stack (MongoDB, ExpressJS, AngularJS and NodeJS) app generator. At first it was a great experience and I was really satisfied with the generator, that was until it had to be maintained.

In the world of web development today it’s hard to stay updated with the ever increasing amount of new modules, libraries and packages that are released each day. What’s hot today can be forgotten tomorrow.