installing paper.js on Mac OS X

Question

I have a question about installing Paper.js. According to the Github link (https://github.com/paperjs/paper.js), the recommended way of installing and maintaining Paper is by Bower for browsers and NPM for Node.js, so I made sure I hade npm and bower installed and then I just ran this command in my project's folder:

$ bower install paper

Is this a tad complicated? Couldn't I have just downloaded the zip file directly to my project's folder and unzipped it? Right now I'm just planning on playing with Paper.js to learn it.

Thanks

Answer 1

It is a bit more complicated than grabbing a zip archive, but bower, npm, and git are standard tools for JS devs these days. now that you have npm and bower, you have nearly direct access to hundreds of js libs including Paper.js, Two.js, Raphael.js, D3, JQuery, Underscore... in-fact most reputable js libs will be hosted on bower and/or npm.

Additionally, you can keep your libs easily updated using these package managers

$ bower update paper

$ npm install raphael

The most important part of using these is that if you publish your own code, you don't need ti include dependancy libs like paper. You can simply include a package.json that will allow whomever loads your code to install dependancies.