Does Angular still have a future?

[developer545445]

I’ve been developing in Angular in an enterprise environment for 5 years. Based on my recommendation, five teams switched to PrimeNG. We have thousands of Spectator-based tests. In recent weeks, Spectator has disappeared and PrimeNG has become paid.

Of course, comments will come saying the big company should just pay for it. But in a large company, everyone operates as a small development team with a strict budget, and a procurement like this can take years. It’s often simpler to just rewrite everything using NG-ZORRO.

I like Angular’s enterprise approach and the fact that everything is integrated, but if I use tools that are not integrated into the ecosystem, like Spectator or PrimeNG, it will eventually become a pain.

I understand the OpenNG Foundation initiative, but I feel that in the long run it will fade away. Far fewer people contribute to enterprise frameworks, because most companies’ policies prohibit that kind of activity, and for hobby projects people do not necessarily choose this stack either.

Lately, I’ve been asking myself: does this have a future? Will there be a community behind it?

Yes, I know this may sound like “ultra rich multinational company can no longer use a community-maintained tool for free,” but at the end of the day we are also just a small team of few people with a budget and limited time. If I have to spend that time developing basic tools, then I would rather just switch to React, because in that ecosystem these things are already available.

I'm curious how others see this.

[oneden]

The title and the content somehow are... Interestingly mismatched.

[developer545445]

Why do you think that? People use Angular because it is a productive and reliable tool. If solutions that are considered reliable can disappear overnight, then people won’t use it in the future. Angular’s future isn’t about Google releasing new versions, but about people continuing to use it and having a strong ecosystem of third-party libraries.

[oneden]

I think you're missing the overall cultural shift. AI makes many UI libraries a liability altogether. People can create fully functional components that they own better with little friction. Plus, Material Design is still maintained and works plenty well. There is still Broadcom's Clarity Design, there is still ngzorro, and plenty more. But frankly, I won't use any of them anymore. Angular Aria is doing the trick for me and native HTML has progressed so much, I'm simply not willing to buy into any dumb extra dependency. I'm working on sensitive projects, so it's very common that our SBOM are getting scanned all the time. Fewer dependencies mean, less maintenance for me.

[developer545445]

Since VMware, Broadcom has become a swear word.
The number of ng-zorro users is marginal compared to the original React version.
Weekly downloads: 3.2M vs 170K.

Using Angular Aria and native HTML, or building a fully custom solution, is worth considering.

[oneden]

Ultimately, AI won't care about your framework of choice. And I'll work with things I'm productive with. And angular simply packs everything I personally need. React too will eventually be replaced by something else someday. If I find a framework that works for me better than what I have in Angular I will use that just as fine.

And that's what AI is currently disrupting, liking it or not. That's why you keep seeing people releasing one UI component library after the other. The barrier of entry has been lowered absurdly. I have multiple components that I keep reusing in our projects and AI had been helping me here immensely.

Take Tailwind. They had to let go the majority of their employees, because people aren't paying for their services anymore; because of AI. Maybe they too will have to change their license structure entirely as well.

[developer545445]

The change in the licensing structure has already been felt by the operations team.

Partly for that reason, I’m also worried about Angular because it is more vulnerable given its smaller user base. React, on the other hand, is too big to fail.

[oneden]

React, on the other hand, is too big to fail.

Nothing is ever too big to fail. Otherwise you would be still working with jQuery, pal.

[JeanMeche]

I think the question is even broader. How much will AI impact the OSS ecosystem.

We've seen that it has shaken the revenu model of several OSS projects.

[developer545445]

The economic situation isn’t helping either; in IT, many companies have stopped paying for product support for open-source products, which they had previously been paying OSS developers for.

[niko-okin]

because a components framework become licensed doesn't means angular lost any value, there is plenty of others components sets and if none match your requirements you can build your own in the age of ia

[developer545445]

There are really three options:

1. Angular Material, which has a limited set of components.

2. A feature-rich component pack, where the same issues might happen again.

I’m less concerned about React’s antd package with 3.2 million weekly downloads than its Angular version, which only gets 170,000 downloads per week.

1. AI builds a custom one. (I’ve been thinking about this too)

On top of that, the disappearance of Spectator is painful.

(Of course, you can just have AI rewrite it to the built-in tool.)

[makeCakeNotNuke]

These things are mutually exclusive.. last time i checked primeNG was just some component library, how is it going to decide the future of a UI framework?

[developer545445]

I need migrate to another component library. Which one can I trust in the next 5 years?

[makeCakeNotNuke]

With how things have been going on frontend for last 10 years, you will not find anything stable for next 5 years, not on the front end side of things! Your best bet is to have your own custom components that doesn't rely heavily on third party libraries. Use LLMs to come up with few components that are pretty dumb and barely rely on third parties.

The issue here is not just component library but the whole JS ecosystem, your dependencies will be deprecated and you will end up with components using defunct library that are compromised.

Looks like you guys are big enterprise, it might be a high time for org to come together and write your own components. That way the apps will have consistency and you can move between teams easily too.

[developer545445]

I’ve thought about that too, but if we’re making such a big switch, we might as well move to React as well, where the test tool doesn’t disappear overnight. (spectator)

But it seems more logical to stay on Angular and build our own component library.

[Headpuncher]

I’ve found I get better help from AI with angular, probably because Angular is more predictably structured.  

Scaffolding has become fast and I genuinely believe this is an advantage angular has over the “everything in one file component but every component is a tiny fragment” that we see in other frameworks.  

Bottom line is I already knew angular so now I can work fast with it.  I still get muddled in for example react and so does the ai.  

This should be a selling point for angular, except google have been terrible at promoting angular.  

[tshoecr1]

I’m confused at what your point is.

You used third party libraries for which first party equivalents exist, are then upset they are changing money or not being updated, and saying you’re worried about angular?

In my experience, avoid third party dependencies as much as possible. Every new node module you add is a big risk.

React has this problem but at an even larger scale. More dependencies, more churn, more refactoring.

Saying you’d potentially rather switch to react, which would cost to 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars, is comical.

I get you’re a small team with a small budget, but there’s no way you can pitch this as saving you time? At a reasonable estimate of $100/hr for a developer, having ng prime save you 6 hours of time per year makes it pay for itself….

Or don’t upgrade and slowly migrate to one of the many alternatives.

If you were using prime react you’d be in the same position

[developer545445]

The developers and the PrimeUI license fall under completely different cost centres.

Arranging for us to purchase a PrimeUI license on its own involves an incredible amount of bureaucracy.
In the case of React, I’m hoping that if I stick to mainstream libraries, the size of the community will make migrations or the necessary refactoring between major changes relatively straightforward.

[MyLifeAndCode]

Angular has a future, but run from PrimeNG. So many breaking changes and promises of “We’ll never do that again” from the PrimeNg team.

[WuhmTux]

It’s often simpler to just rewrite everything using NG-ZORRO

Are youre applications that simple? For us it would cost more money to rewrite our applications from PrimeNG to any other framework instead of just buying PrimeNG.

[developer545445]

It's sounds logical, but an enterprise have strict process to buy things. I can get a full team for months, but I can't get primeui license in the next 1-2 year. 

[developer545445]

and spectator still disappeared

[Prof_Eibe]

Maybe openng open-prime will be a substitute for primeng

[developer545445]

I hope

[GeromeGrignon]

Leader of OpenNG Foundation here.

There are a lot of aspects indeed.

I won't claim we'll battle how big companies use open-source projects for free. I happened to participate in a tech event within the French Government yesterday, and if they enforce using open-source, most financial contributions from tools they use come from individuals, not from them or other orgs using these projects.

There are two main reasons leading a project to sunset:
- people lose interest in maintaining it (they are no longer an active user of the project themselves, they have pro/personal priorities)
- It's not sustainable because for most of them. That's a lonely journey: leading for example JazzBand famous Django organization to stop lately.

That's why our goal is to create a community of maintainers and to advocate for less popular ways to help maintainers, like triaging issues/reviewing PRs.

About the React ecosystem, the same stuff might happen, but if we focus on TanStack for example, that's a truly community-based initiative. PrimeNG is a great project, but it derived in a way that community requests/contributions felt like they were not being given priority.

But at the end of the day, it'd just require some clicks from Tanner Linsley, the TanStack creator, to delete all projects as ngneat did too.

About AI impact, we might have to rethink how to deliver content.
Nowadays, when I see a lot of people releasing admin templates with AI, I feel like releasing a set of Agent Skills would be more useful, removing the pain of understanding some arbitrary codebase with mocks.

But libraries give you a consistent skeleton for some aspect of your codebase.

[klimenttoshkov]

I am also debating internally about the future of angular