The SitePoint PHP blog has a new post today from editor Bruno Skvorc comparing two (almost) identical technologies - Bower and BowerPHP. The main different between the two? One is written in Javascript (Node.js) and the other is, surprise, in PHP. The Bower system is a dependency manager, originally for Node.js environments.

On October 28th, 2014, puppies all over the world spontaneously burst into flames – or so the community would have you believe. What happened was the reveal of BowerPHP (I shy from calling anything “alpha” a release), and here’s why it wasn’t anything nearly as apocalyptic as some would have you believe. BowerPHP is a PHP version of Bower, the NodeJS based front end package manager. We covered Bower before somewhat, but in essence, you use it to install front end libraries like jQuery, Angular or Foundation much in the same way you use Composer for PHP dependencies. You define a Bower file with dependencies, run bower install, and watch the magic happen.

He goes on to talk about what kinds of problems having the same tool in PHP solves and how to get it installed in your application (via Composer). He then includes an example of it in use installing a copy of the Foundation JS libraries and the resulting output HTML page. He finishes the post with a few reasons "why it's awesome" including there not being a need for yet another technology (Node) and that it's easy to install.