We use and have used AngularJS with great success. It (IMHO) assists to bring order to chaos. We haven’t really had much of an issue apart from an initial learning curve and have built some very complex pieces with it. In addition, the resulting code is relatively easy to maintain.
I will agree there is plenty of confusion about how to best do things, which ironically is also one of its strengths. It does sound like you want a very opinionated and prescriptive framework and there are plenty. Right now though, front end dev is an absolute lottery of frameworks and package managers. Pick a framework, hell pick 10, include them with any number of package managers and there is a good chance it won’t be the best solution in a years time (and if it is, keeping up with changes to all your dependencies can be tiiugh), Front end tooling is currently obsessed with the next new thing, rather than getting the job done with a mature thing. While we have currently leaned towards AngularJS for current dev, I will be sitting back and watching the space before committing to any future frameworks, whether Aurelia, react, Angular2, Ember or other. A few will gain ground and possibly fall from favour as kinks and real apps put them to the test. By real apps, I mean average teams doing LOB apps and such. It is great to say a framework is great when used by a team of interstellar genius types. Your team may not fare so well tho. - Glav From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Scott Barnes Sent: Sunday, 9 August 2015 9:02 PM To: ozDotNet <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Last words on AngularJS Adobe Flex, Silverlight and WPF all have the same techniques described and issues with AngularJS. The issue in question is more around the ability to load/unload views in an elegant fashion that leaves you with a sense of simplicity or cleanliness in memory collection as well. Binding is also a huge issue, it was never really rectified as cleanly as I had hoped over the years as i still see binding a problem similiar to how I guess Entity Framework started out "I want to visualise how that field gets its values and trace its origins back through the rest api's down to the metal if need be.." As that's where profiling and stuff comes back to the forefront and helps steal some of the sting out of exceptions. I think you're on the same hunt we've always been on since 2005-2009 whereby we want to create inline apps that have deep linking style loading but without the complexity and code management overheads. AngluarJS or whatever isn't really meant to last beyond maybe a year or two. Anyone who's still shooting for an app that gets designed in 2015 and still useable and manageable in 2020 is on a fools errand as today, the modernizing of apps is constantly going to push your comfort levels. Microsoft is also quite hungry to regrow its grass roots so i'd expect a bit more of healthy chaos from them here as well. That all being said, the JS route is steps backwards not forwards as its still trying to pickup from lost ground that tech like Winforms, Silverlight, WPF and Adobe Flash/Flex (yeah even these had it better) and it's still a bit of a hacky approach to obsfucating as much of free thinking JS from the devs as possible. I think you're feeling the inertia though of the wild js-west, in that there are really no rules here or compiler feedback loops.. you write it, it does something visually and you can't see any obvious signs of memory profilers going out of shape...hey...ship it... and that's the part that leaves me a bit personally nervous ;) ..as in the hands of a "mature" dev it could work great and longevity intact...but...in my experience not all teams are "mature" and you have a variety of styles of thinking / code here so it's now back to some serious code-reviews to maybe act as the last safeguard in thinking here? *if* i had to pick i'd say AngularJS is probably the closest to the previous styles of thinking and that's probably the first red flag ;) --- Regards, Scott Barnes http://www.riagenic.com On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 7:35 PM, Greg Keogh <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote: We're you using RequireJS? RequireJS is something you can use to bring in common and worker viewmodels. It may be your missing link! I just had a glance over the main web pages. In a rush I get impression that this is library that simulates dependencies between JavaScript files (because there is no such native concept). I can't picture in my head how this would boost productivity or enhance the development experience, it looks like just something else to clutter and confuse what you're doing. But it's late, so I might be missing the point and I need to read more -- GK
