When comparing Volo vs Duo, the Slant community recommends Duo for most people. In the question“What are the best open source front-end package managers?” Duo is ranked 6th while Volo is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Duo is:
Because Duo allows you to require dependencies directly in your html, css, and javascript, you don't need to manage annoying build processes. Duo automatically supports preprocessed languages like Coffeescript and Sass, and automatically bundles them into a single file, making it an easy-to-use, all-in-one tool. All you have to do is run `duo in > out` and you're done!
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Pros
Pro Automatically converts files to AMD for you
Volo is based around AMD, which is great for asynchronous loading, and if you try to add a non-AMD package, it will interactively ask you for its dependencies and exports.
Pro Provides command endpoints for task management
Volo also allows you to provide a volofile that lets you run various tasks. Volo provides a helper object for running cross platform command line commands, and also allows you to use binaries in node_modules
or create your own.
Pro Quickly bootstrap your project with templates
Volo has a create
command that can copy template projects from GitHub, so you can get set up quickly.
Pro Allows for extensible commands
Sometimes you might require some additional commands, other than the ones Volo provides; Volo has you covered in these cases as well. The package manager is extremely extensible at its core, and can be easily modified and extended.
Pro Loads packages directly from Github
If any project exists on Github, that means you can use it along with Volo in your frontend projects.
Pro Handles the entire build and packaging process for you
Because Duo allows you to require dependencies directly in your html, css, and javascript, you don't need to manage annoying build processes. Duo automatically supports preprocessed languages like Coffeescript and Sass, and automatically bundles them into a single file, making it an easy-to-use, all-in-one tool. All you have to do is run duo in > out
and you're done!
Pro Allows you to directly require dependencies from Javascript, HTML, and CSS
With Duo you don't need to manage a separate dependency file, you just require projects from your files where you need them. It works with all front-end languages, giving you powerful inline Javascript, HTML, CSS, and even JSON management in a way that no other package manager supports.
Pro Require directly from github
Duo allows you to use require
to import packages directly from github using the username/package_name@version
syntax. The version is optional, in case you want to test out a new package quickly.
Pro Built on top of Component
Duo can be seen as an easier to use, more feature complete wrapper around component.
Pro Supports both Bower and Component packages
Duo is primarily designed to support Component packages, but Bower package support is available with npm support planned, so you can use Duo with libraries as well as components.
Cons
Con Does not store components in a registry
Volo installs components directly from urls and repositories, which makes it more susceptible to components being taken down, with fewer guarantees about their availability.
Con Harder to manage versions between files
Because versions and dependencies can be specified inline, it might be harder to update your packages when you want to upgrade. (However, it is possible to specify dependencies in a JSON file.)
Con Cannot extract modules from a bundle and put into another one
As for common modules shared by multiple pages, duo.js cannot extract and put them into another bundle which is loaded commonly. On the other hand, modules modified rarely should put into another bundle so they can be still cached when other modules change.