I'm currently working on a small AngularJS application to deploy on a web server, but I'm having a hard time understanding the difference between using Angular's startup seed compared to linking the script in the HTML, like this:
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/angularjs/1.5.4/angular.js"></script>
I understand that using the startup seed lets you develop locally, but you can also link the script and download something like http-server to achieve the same effect, right?
So what are the benefits/drawbacks to using one startup method over another? Specifically, which would be more beneficial for hosting the app on a web server like Apache?
The benefit the seed adds is in configuration. They have done a lot of setup by creating and configuring a task runner to handle things like running a local web server, unit and e2e testing.
Without the seed you would have to set all of that up yourself from scratch. But if you don't care about testing, and you want to use your own local web server, then you don't need it.
Honestly if you are planning on hosting your even-remotely serious web app on a server, you have a lot more to worry about than what the seed provides.
You'll need a build process to concatenate all of your vendor and source code into a one large minified, obfuscated file for serving to the masses, for starters.