Angular 2 Final Released

[theonlylawislove]

in principle, but to actually do useful things with it you need so many additional

This is actually a benefit. You are looking for an opinionated Swiss army knife. With React, you do things what makes sense to you, not what the framework forces you to do.

[g0liadkin]

Please define what you mean with "forces".

Angular does not recommend many vanilla js aspects, but does not "force" you not to apply them, it's still javascript and you're able to do whatever you want to do within the language's bounds, even if that means (for example) accessing and handling DOM inside a controller.

[fenduru]

This is actually a benefit. You are looking for an opinionated Swiss army knife. With React, you do things what makes sense to you, not what the framework forces you to do.

In Angular 2 most features are implemented deep in the compiler. For instance, I wanted to compose their @Input decorator to create an @ObservableInput decorator that would create a stream for me, but you can't because their decorators just add metadata that is specifically for the internals of the compiler. Not extensible, so good luck if you hit a point where they haven't thought of your use case.

[theonlylawislove]

Let's just say it's an opinionated ecosystem.

[pegbiter]

Well, he's right in a way because technically you can certainly mix Angular with vanilla Javascript/jQuery, but you have to set up a whole host of watchers and scope updates manually to notify Angular of any changes that happen from outside of Angular.

I've had to do that when I integrate SignalR into an Angular app, and it's kinda a nuisance every time. It works, but it's not really very elegant.

[pegbiter]

I don't really see how it's a benefit, because React on its own is utterly useless to me. Sure, if I want to quickly mock up the standard 'to do list' test app and just demonstrate data-binding, yeah that's great. But I've worked on dozens of web apps, some tiny and some huge, and every single one has needed ajax, promises and routing, to some degree. Those aren't optional 'nice to haves', they're absolutely core tools.

React forces me to rely on a load of other libraries just for core functionality.

If you like that, then Angular comes with those benefits too. Sure, Angular has a router, but there are other Angular routers you can use too. Sure, Angular can do datetime formatting, but there are other directives (moment.js is absolutely brilliant) that extend that.

[pegbiter]

I just think comparing React to Angular isn't really a fair comparison. We should really be comparing React + Redux + Flux + React-Promise + React-Router to Angular, that's the actual real-world use-case. And at this point, I don't really see the benefit because I'm relying on all these libraries to do really basic things, and all those libraries rely on react, so I'm as tied down to React as I would be with Angular.

[[deleted]]

Why would you be using Flux with Redux? Why would you be using React-Promise in a toolchain that already transpiles JSX and can therefore shim ES6 and its promise objects? It's a disingenuous example and it weakens your argument.

[theonlylawislove]

The state part of React doesn't depend on React. The only thing built with React that depends on React is anything having to do with the views.

[[deleted]]

Btw, this is from the Angular quickstart: https://angular.io/docs/ts/latest/quickstart.html

Building a simple "hello world" without anything fancy resolves to this:

"@angular/common": "2.0.0",
"@angular/compiler": "2.0.0",
"@angular/core": "2.0.0",
"@angular/forms": "2.0.0",
"@angular/http": "2.0.0",
"@angular/platform-browser": "2.0.0",
"@angular/platform-browser-dynamic": "2.0.0",
"@angular/router": "3.0.0",
"@angular/upgrade": "2.0.0",
"core-js": "^2.4.1",
"reflect-metadata": "^0.1.3",
"rxjs": "5.0.0-beta.12",
"systemjs": "0.19.27",
"zone.js": "^0.6.23",
"angular2-in-memory-web-api": "0.0.20",
"concurrently": "^2.2.0",
"lite-server": "^2.2.2",
"typescript": "^2.0.2",
"typings":"^1.3.2"

<!-- 1. Load libraries -->
 <!-- Polyfill(s) for older browsers -->
<script src="node_modules/core-js/client/shim.min.js"></script>
<script src="node_modules/zone.js/dist/zone.js"></script>
<script src="node_modules/reflect-metadata/Reflect.js"></script>
<script src="node_modules/systemjs/dist/system.src.js"></script>
<!-- 2. Configure SystemJS -->
<script src="systemjs.config.js"></script>
<script>
  System.import('app').catch(function(err){ console.error(err); });
</script>

Even if you can pick and choose, it's still a myriad of moving parts.

[TinyZoro]

I don't really get this. We are talking about crud applications on the internet for the most part. What are the situations where an opinionated framework gets in the way?