Welcome to Aura
===============

Aura is a decoupled, event-driven framework for developing widget-based
applications. As an architecture it takes advantage of patterns best
practices for developing maintainable applications.

The framework itself is leverages libraries and patterns front end
developer find familiar. Aura's source code is publicly available and
is backed by headless and browser unit tests.

Fresh front-end programmers can study the concepts of Aura and
implementation of libraries to build applications and learn tools like
AMD, grunt, unit tests in the process.

Intermediate programmers can hit the ground running utilizing experience
already learned with requirejs and AMD spec modules and apply the
libraries of their choice.

For a more technical overview, see :doc:`./implementation`.

**Features:**

- hit the ground running quickly widgets into reusable modules using the
  `AMD`_ format.
- abstraction of vendor library's such as `jQuery`_, `Ender`_ and
  `Zepto`_.
- relies on familiar tools inside such as `grunt`_ for develpment
  dependencies and `Bower`_ for browser libraries.
- unit tests in `Mocha`_ and `PhantomJS`_.
- third-party support for `Yeoman`_.


Demos and examples can be found via the Aura homepage or may be it locally
by downloading the code.

You can **catch the latest developments** at the `Aura Github Page`_ or
**jump right in** and :doc:`build_an_app`.


The project is based on concepts discussed by Nicholas Zakas in `Scalable
Application Architecture`_ and by Addy in `Large-scale Application Development`_.

.. include:: contents.rst.inc

.. _Aura Github Page: http://www.github.com/aurajs/aura
.. _Scalable Application Architecture: http://www.slideshare.net/nzakas/scalable-javascript-application-architecture
.. _Large-scale Application Development: http://addyosmani.com/largescalejavascript/

.. _AMD: http://requirejs.org/docs/whyamd.html
.. _jQuery: http://www.jquery.com/
.. _Ender: http://ender.jit.su/
.. _Zepto: http://zeptojs.com/
.. _grunt: http://gruntjs.com/
.. _Bower: http://twitter.github.com/bower/
.. _Mocha: http://visionmedia.github.com/mocha/
.. _PhantomJS: http://phantomjs.org/
.. _Yeoman: http://yeoman.io/