Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Bower VS Turbolinks

Compare Bower VS Turbolinks and see what are their differences

Bower logo Bower

Bower is a package manager for the web.

Turbolinks logo Turbolinks

Turbolinks makes navigating your web application faster
  • Bower Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-03
  • Turbolinks Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-17

Bower features and specs

  • Dependency Management
    Bower provides an easy way to manage front-end dependencies, allowing developers to quickly add, update, and remove libraries.
  • Flat Dependency Tree
    Bower maintains a flat dependency tree, which means there are no nested dependencies, reducing the chances of version conflicts.
  • Language Agnostic
    Bower can manage any static content used in a web application, regardless of whether it's JavaScript, CSS, HTML, or images.
  • Human-Readable Configuration
    The configuration file (bower.json) is easy to read and edit, making it user-friendly for developers.
  • Wide Adoption
    Despite newer tools emerging, Bower is still widely used in the industry and has a large repository of packages.

Possible disadvantages of Bower

  • Deprecated
    Bower is officially deprecated, and the maintainers recommend using Yarn and Webpack for the new projects.
  • Limited Scope
    Bower is primarily focused on front-end packages, whereas other tools like npm and Yarn can handle both front-end and back-end packages.
  • No Native Support for Version Locking
    Bower does not natively support version locking (like package-lock.json in npm), which can lead to inconsistencies across environments.
  • Redundant with npm
    Bower's functionality overlaps significantly with npm, which has become the standard for both front-end and back-end package management.
  • Maintenance Overhead
    Using Bower alongside npm can add unnecessary maintenance overhead to projects, as developers need to manage dependencies in two separate tools.

Turbolinks features and specs

  • Fast Page Loads
    Turbolinks makes use of AJAX to load only the content that changes between pages, leading to faster page transitions compared to full page reloads.
  • Ease of Use
    It can be easily integrated into a Rails application with minimal setup and code changes, providing fast results without a steep learning curve.
  • Reduced Server Load
    By minimizing full-page reloads, Turbolinks can help reduce server load and usage, as well as client bandwidth.
  • Improved User Experience
    By providing faster navigation and transitions, Turbolinks can create a smoother and more efficient user experience similar to that of a single-page application.

Possible disadvantages of Turbolinks

  • JavaScript Compatibility Issues
    Turbolinks can cause issues with existing JavaScript code that relies on traditional DOMContentLoaded events, requiring additional configuration or workarounds.
  • SEO Challenges
    Since Turbolinks primarily changes content dynamically, it can pose challenges for search engine optimization unless properly handled.
  • Limited Use Cases
    Turbolinks is best suited for pages where content changes without heavy interactivity, and may not be ideal for highly interactive applications.
  • Backward Compatibility
    Integrating Turbolinks into an existing application might require significant changes to JavaScript code to ensure compatibility.

Analysis of Bower

Overall verdict

  • Bower is now considered outdated and largely deprecated in favor of more modern alternatives. While it served its purpose in the past, the web development community has largely moved on to other tools that offer better integration with current build systems and frameworks.

Why this product is good

  • Bower was a popular package manager for web projects, designed to handle front-end libraries and dependencies. It simplified the management of project dependencies, resolved versioning conflicts, and allowed for efficient front-end development. However, as the web development landscape has evolved, tools like npm and Yarn have become more standard due to their broader functionalities, community support, and seamless integration with modern module systems.

Recommended for

    Bower may still be of some use to maintain legacy projects that originally relied on it. However, for any new projects or updates, it's recommended to use npm, Yarn, or other modern package managers and build tools.

Bower videos

Walmart $30 Ring Light ! | Bower 8 Inch Ring Light Review!

More videos:

  • Review - BOWER Multi Pod Unboxing and Review - Best Tripod for Beginners?
  • Review - $29 BOWER 8โ€ RING LIGHT WALMART UNBOXING, SET-UP & REVIEW

Turbolinks videos

Improving Your Page Load Speeds on Any Site with Turbolinks

More videos:

  • Review - 16 Laravel Livewire SPA using Turbolinks
  • Review - True hybrid mobile applications with Turbolinks

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Bower and Turbolinks)
JS Build Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Software Development
0 0%
100% 100
Front End Package Manager
Web Application Bundler
68 68%
32% 32

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Turbolinks should be more popular than Bower. It has been mentiond 14 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Bower mentions (7)

  • SuperUtilsPlus: A Modern Alternative to Lodash
    I do sort of miss bower [0] for this reason. It was really just a way to download javascript and plunk it into your application. It was standard practice to check all of your vendor dependencies into SCM. [1] Of course a good chunk of it was transformed through something like Gulp or Grunt before being added to the bower repository so you were unlikely to maintain those once checked in, but there was still quite a... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • 100+ Must-Have Web Development Resources
    Bower: A web package manager for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, fonts, and even images. - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
  • 5 NPM Alternatives You Should Try
    Bower is a package manager specifically designed for front-end web development. It can be used to manage JavaScript, CSS, and HTML packages and dependencies. It was developed by Twitter and is known for its simplicity and ease of use. However, it is worth noting that Bower is no longer actively maintained, and developers are encouraged to use other package managers like Yarn or PNPM instead. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • zachrytylerwood/vscode
    Bower dependency directory (https://bower.io/). Source: over 2 years ago
  • The Emperor's New Library
    What we see, a decade ago, are that many of the "popular" libraries, frameworks, and methods, not surprisingly, have gone by the wayside, a lot that have remained in current code as difficult-to-removemodernize legacy cruft (Bower, Gulp, Grunt, Backbone, Angular 1, ...), and then we have the small minority that are still here. Some that remain have had their utility lessened/questioned by platform and language... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
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Turbolinks mentions (14)

  • Hotwire: HTML Over The Wire
    First off, name calling. Second, I actually thought the same as you but digging into the history I don't see any records of a public release of Hotwire until December of 2020, and HTMX was public in May of that year. I'm pretty sure what I was thinking of was actually Turbolinks: https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • What is the best way to add dynamic workflow in django template ?
    You can find out more about Turbolinks on the GitHub repository (https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks). The repo is now archived, because itโ€™s was integrated in a framework called Turbo, but the functionality is the same. Source: over 2 years ago
  • A Comprehensive Guide to Rails Internationalization
    // app/javascript/src/helpers/price.js // Turbolinks are enabled by default in Rails, // we need to process our script on every page load // https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks#full-list-of-events Document.addEventListener("turbolinks:ready", () => { // Get language from html tag const lang = document.documentElement.lang; // Find all span tags with data-localize="price" const pricesOnPage =... - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • An SPA Alternative
    Https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks It provides a smooth UX by fetching next page's HTML in background, then replace the DOM by compareing the diff in HTML. So you won't see a blank page while navigating between pages. - Source: Hacker News / about 3 years ago
  • Get Started with Hotwire in Your Ruby on Rails App
    If you have used Turbolinks in the past, you will feel right at home with Turbo Drive. At its core, some JS code intercepts JavaScript events on your application, loads HTML asynchronously, and replaces parts of your HTML markup. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Bower and Turbolinks, you can also consider the following products

npm - npm is a package manager for Node.

RubyGems - RubyGems. org is the Ruby community's gem hosting service. Instantly publish your gems and then install them. Use the API find out more about available gems. Become a contributor and improve the site yourself.

Ender - Frontend Development

GitHub - Originally founded as a project to simplify sharing code, GitHub has grown into an application used by over a million people to store over two million code repositories, making GitHub the largest code host in the world.

Webpack - Webpack is a module bundler. Its main purpose is to bundle JavaScript files for usage in a browser, yet it is also capable of transforming, bundling, or packaging just about any resource or asset.

JUST - Service to find a job in sports and eSports.