Move away from bower

[arthurhsu]

Lovefield needs to have a simpler package management. We should just use one package management system for our source code so that dependency management can be simplified.

One major reason we use bower before is that Polymer does not work well without bower. This is no longer the case.

[freshp86]

Can you be a bit more specific about what makes current situation complex? The overhead of supporting bower and NPM seems pretty light (maintaining a package.json, bower.json files). Bower is still pretty popular AFAIK so I would be hesitant to move away from it unless there are concrete simplifications on the Lovefield side.

[arthurhsu]

I did not mean remove Lovefield's registration on bower. I mean remove Lovefield's internal usage of bower. So all dev process is streamlined as npm install and gulp, ruling out dependencies on bower.

There's not a feature in bower that Lovefield uses today not provided by npm.

[douglasg14b]

Agreed on this (1.5 years later), bower has died off and NPM has moved forward as the defacto package manager for front end dependencies... It just adds another barrier to entry for using the library.