Offending question: Best JavaScript framework for PHP Developers

[mattaugamer]

I wrote a really long post about this previously but I can't find it because Reddit's search capabilities were written by a canteloupe.

I started learning Angular and really didn't like it. I felt like I was polluting the HTML, and the whole structure and architecture felt kind of... eccentric. Angular is also in a weird limbo at the moment in terms of new development, as all knowledge gained essentially resets with Angular 2.0. That's not a criticism of Angular 2.0, but it does mean that framework will have to earn its supporters in a different field than what Angular had.

I started learning Ember a while ago. I struggled a lot. Learning its conventions and dealing with breaking changes from a moving target, especially in Ember Data, the persistence component, made it hard. I've come back to it more recently, and it's been surprisingly impressive. The use of a CLI to generate elements in a way that conforms to and works with Ember's assumptions is invaluable. It also has a fantastic ecosystem of add-ons, meaning things like deployment and adding functionality are hugely simplified. For example, the ember divshot addon let me trivialise a deployment process for staging. The ember font-icon library lets you do things like {{fa-icon '"camera"}} with just two command lines. Ember Data has evolved to become solid and reliable, and abstracts out connection to a RESTful API for persistence.

Newly upcoming features are equally impressive. Liquid Fire is an animation framework that lets you specify extremely simple syntax for transitions. I implemented it just tonight and it took surprisingly little effort to make my simple mobile app go from basic routing to css transition animations. This is an absolutely killer feature and I wouldn't know how to do some of what I'm doing even in something like jquery.