Here at SimBco we spend a lot of time building thick client applications. That means we are building javascript applications that run in the browser without page refreshes. Depending on our clients needs we build these with either BackboneJS and MarionetteJS or with AngularJS.
In building applications with Backbone we utilize a build framework called brunch.io. Brunch predates the more popular javascript automation tools like Grunt and Gulp and has been a huge part of our toolset for a long time. Brunch allows you to create skeleton projects to use as the base for new work and our team utilizes one of these. We originally released our skeleton (Brunch with Marionette) in January of 2013 and have been making small tweaks to it ever since.
Today we made a pretty significant update to the skeleton and have called it 2.0 since the update is to come into compliance with MarionetteJS 2.x. In addition to fixing the templates to match updated naming and functionality in Marionette 2, we also switched our library dependencies to be installed with Bower. Previously every time one of the dependent libraries updated we had to go update the skeleton. With bower each time you create a new project from our skeleton you will get the newest patch for the dependencies like jQuery, underscore and backbone.
Brunch with Marionette helps us get off to a quick start when building our backbone based applications for our clients. And we hope it will help you as well.