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Roots

Roots is a toolkit built on best practices for advanced front-end web development. It has a very large number of features, which I’ll attempt to list below. Roots comes in the form of a static site build tool by default, but also includes templates and plugins for express and rails.

  • extremely simple installation
  • clean and minimal default project template
  • clean and intuitive app settings file
  • jade, stylus, and coffeescript default stack
  • easy to add languages with a simple and well-documented plugin interface
  • super fast live reload implementation
  • compile errors displayed as a flash message, doesn’t break workflow
  • layouts and partials fully supported
  • coffeescript and markdown can be written directly in views
  • global variables and functions (view helpers)
  • extremely robust, modular, and powerful css helper library built in
  • single command deploy to heroku, nodejitsu, or github pages
  • intelligently minifies html, css, and js on deploy
  • efficient client-side js management through bower and require.js
  • automatically precompiles jade templates for use in client-side MVCs like backbone
  • use dynamic content to create collections, blogs, etc
  • compile a single file for multiple languages