

My View after working with AngularJS for 1 week - ericthegoodking

Hey everyone,<p>I just started programming in Angular JS and my conclusion is that it is just too hard for nothing, making it a horrible framework for app developers who are constrained on time.Does Any one  here share my views on this?
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tynman
It's a painful learning curve, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth it. I used
to do all my apps in jQuery and was pretty adept at cross-component
communication using events. Angular made me think about SPAs in a completely
different way, and I'd never go back.

It's very popular to deride a framework or a language because it's too hard to
learn. My experience is that I grow as a developer if I can think about
problems from different perspectives. As an old professor used to remind us,
"It's good for the soul."

As for speed, now that I'm fluent in Angular I can do a lot more in less code.
Since Angular is opinionated on structure and there's been a strong community
effort toward standardizing architecture and style, the tooling (seed projects
and generators) has come a long way in the past couple of years.

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ponyous
Everyone is mentioning how angular is to hard, how its learning curve is
really steep. But I felt completely the opposite when I started, it was much
simpler than backbone or some other tool - this is why I fell in love with
it... I also came from jQuery.

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chatmasta
Too hard for nothing huh? Wish it was hard for more things? ;)

Double negatives aside, I tend to agree with you. I haven't done much frontend
programming, but am about to undertake a medium sized project architected as a
single page webapp. So my perspeftive in evaluating these frameworks is one of
a fairly experienced non-frontend programmer. I can learn one easily, it's
just a question of which I want to learn.

I looked at Angular and I really like the composability of directives. It
seems like frontend frameworks have been maturing along a trend of
composability. First jquery was popular because it eased the pain of
manipulating individual elements of the DOM, then backbone was (and still is)
popular because it introduced reactive components at a time when server side
JS was growing in popularity, so it was a natural fit. Recently, angular grew
in popularity for the same reactive advantages. There's something really
attractive about the idea of cleanly separated code for each physical
element/region on a page. That's why people liked directives, and angular was
definitely onto something.

However, it seems like React accomplishes all of the same feats as angular,
and offers the same advantages, but does it in a much cleaner fashion. JSX is
far more intuitive than the Angular directive syntax, yet maintains all the
composability advantages. It also has a natural place in a full stack
arxhitecture if you choose to drink the look aid and implement a flux-like
design. To me, React seems like the next step in the evolution of reactive
frontend frameworks. Angular is the homo erectus to React's homo sapiens. :)

If you're starting a new project now, it seems to make far more sense to go
with react over angular, especially if you're primarily interested in the east
composability patterns. Also, the momentum in developer communities is clearly
trending toward React, especially with the recent changes announced for
Angular, and the continually improving support of react.

I was also introduced to Pete Hunt, core contributor to react, a few years
ago. He was smart as hell and honestly that's enough of a reason for me to
prefer React over Angular.

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joshschreuder
I haven't used React / Backbone / the other frameworks in this space, but I
started using Angular about a year and a half ago and felt a bit frustrated
when I first started too (coming from a basic jQuery background).

There are a number of different ways of thinking around Angular that might be
confusing at first but I have grown to really enjoy writing in it, despite its
flaws (which have been discussed here at length recently).

I don't know whether it's appropriate to learn if you are in a time crunch,
but go back to it when you have a bit more time to kill because you may end up
enjoying some of the concepts and features.

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debacle
If you want to use Angular but don't want to drink the Kool-aid, Knockout.js
provides a good balance between "Here's some MVVM stuff." and "Everything you
do must be Angular."

~~~
lastofus
Knockout.js is fantastic. I thought this was a good comparison:

[http://www.scottlogic.com/blog/2014/07/30/spa-angular-
knocko...](http://www.scottlogic.com/blog/2014/07/30/spa-angular-
knockout.html)

~~~
justplay
Knockout is one of the best js library out there .. but now it looks like they
are also expanding; they have planned to introduce components.

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silveira
That's the first week. See [http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2439-my-experience-
with-angular...](http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2439-my-experience-with-
angularjs-the-super-heroic-javascript-mvw-framework.htm)

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jf22
Could you share your javascript experience level, how many years you've been
programming?

Have you used MVVM style or MVC javascript components before?

What exactly did you try to do in one week?

