Angular solves more than the UI problem,React on its own doesnt solve the architecturing problem , AngularJS does.
The big weakness of Angular is server side rendering,which involves heavy solutions like phantomjs,while you can render react components on the server.
Angular is not very good at rendering/managing svg either,that's a fact.
I would argue maintaining pure html templates is not that hard.
But frankly Angular solves so many problems these are minor issues.Writing complex lob applications is so easy with Angular I wouldnt want to use anything else.
The only case i'd switch back to backbone+react/vue/ractive and jquery is when i'm writing interactive experiences that are not CRUD apps.
So no,dont switch to React for the sake of switching especially since AngularJS just works. I mean people dont even bother learning javascript,they learn AngularJS ...
Some good comments there, worth checking out. Personally, I think the message loop architecture proved very good in Windows when processors were slow and had only 1 core and it is at least worth giving it a try in web development.
Hence my question. I feel like for some apps I don't need 60% of what Angular has to offer (routing, controllers, modules etc.) I would be satisfied with just directives. Which are probably the part of Angular I like the least.
For SPAs I see no other alternative to Angular currently. In instances where I need heavy JS only on some pages, I'm not sure.
React with a simple router and perhaps some help with your models (Flux or Backbone) might be enough for your needs. Any user behavior that requires new data could be an ajax call that passes back the entire state of the current 'page', which could then replace the state of top-level component (since you want most of your state to reside there anyways). React takes over from there. You'd be relying mostly on your server-side framework for the logic.
You could then incrementally add logic client-side to improve performance, if that's necessary (if the state object becomes too large, for example).
I'd be interested to know what problems Angular has with SVG. I'm currently working on a fairly large SPA and am using SVG fairly extensively, both for simple stuff like icons and for more complicated things like document annotation. I haven't run into any problems thus far.
doesnt work that well. Displaying SVG has never been a problem,they are like images. Unlike images they can be nested ,animated,modified at run time,scaled... if you think you can just create meta svg shapes with directives think again.
I'm very interested in working with SVG in the browser and have found it to work pretty well with React. I built a demo (Code: https://github.com/jonase/elements, App: http://jonase.github.io/elements/) using one of the (increasing number of) React wrappers for ClojureScript (Chrome only for the moment I'm afraid)
The big weakness of Angular is server side rendering,which involves heavy solutions like phantomjs,while you can render react components on the server.
Angular is not very good at rendering/managing svg either,that's a fact.
I would argue maintaining pure html templates is not that hard.
But frankly Angular solves so many problems these are minor issues.Writing complex lob applications is so easy with Angular I wouldnt want to use anything else.
The only case i'd switch back to backbone+react/vue/ractive and jquery is when i'm writing interactive experiences that are not CRUD apps.
So no,dont switch to React for the sake of switching especially since AngularJS just works. I mean people dont even bother learning javascript,they learn AngularJS ...