It has many capabilities useful to the modern web dev workflow.
Of most note to me, it acts as a "project creation" tool. AKA "A Scaffolding generator."
It will pull things like HTML5 Boilerplate, jQuery, Backbone.js, etc down from github, and properly generate the project files you need to start a project with those dependencies.
You dont have to worry about how any of it fits together, it will get you up and running with the latest version of everything with a simple commandline.
It also does things like minify css and javascript, as well as compiling LESS/SASS and Coffeescript.
They are unfortunately trying to make a single tool that solves many problems, when they might be better served by making many tools, that are all good at 1 thing each... I'm still waiting for them to launch this so I can see how that all pans out.
If you have already built a few web apps, wouldn't you already have your scaffolding that can be copied into a new app? And as a bonus, you will have scaffolding that you understand very well.
"You don't have to worry about how any of it fits together..." That doesn't seem like an advantage.
I agree with this. I like knowing exactly what all the pieces of my stack are, and how they mesh together.
If someone is churning out websites right and left I could see this being a more interesting tool, as it seems to be more powerful that any "boilerplate generation" scripts I would write myself.
The pain point of managing dependencies is indeed non-trivial in my experience, so I will keep an open mind for tools that look to solve this.
Random stream-of-consciousness idea: I create a new directory, and in it a text file containing the following on separate lines: "jQuery html5boilerplate AngularJS". I then run a build command to pull all these resources together in a sane way. This would allow me the fine-grained control I prefer, help ease the tedium of fetching dependencies, and obviate the need for a stream of "yes/no" questions at the terminal. This functionality may exist already, and it seems like it could be built by leveraging the logic being Yeoman, but with a different "UI".
Can this tool connect to a mysql database and generate html5 CRUD forms based on the database? I have seen a tool like phreeze.com and I am wondering why there is not more in that direction (building web app basic pages based on existing database design)?
This is a tool for front-end developers. It would have to support a myriad of server-side languages for that, which is completely out of scope, and tools that do it already exist.
