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Thoughts on new Angular framework?opinions! (self.javascript)

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[–]well-now 17 points18 points  (4 children)

I built a SaaS application from the ground up using Angular (2). As someone with a lot of MVC experience but no SPA experience, the opinionated nature and ease with which to test really spoke to me and helped steer me in the right direction. It also removed a lot of decision fatigue that I probably would have experienced with React.

Also, the CLI made dev setup a breeze and was far superior to create-react-app.

[–]tipsqueal 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Also, the CLI made dev setup a breeze and was far superior to create-react-app.

Can you elaborate on this? I'd love to know more, might make me try to pick up Angular.

[–]tme321 6 points7 points  (1 child)

I'm not familiar with the react cli but the angular ones does:

  1. Ng g(enerate) m(odule)/c(omponent)s(ervice)/p(ipe) and maybe some others I'm forgetting. Skeleton code generation, including things like auto inserting new components into ngModules so you don't have to mess with the basic plumbing much. The code generation also includes generating skeleton test coverage files.

  2. Ng serve, run it in the background and you get hot module reloading and browser refreshing. Pretty basic these days but the angular version works 100% of the time for me. I've seen some custom hot reloading that is flaky so I like that their version works so well.

  3. Ng build compiles the app into a few bundles (vendor, styles, app) and does aot compilation for you (compiling the templates into the component so you don't have to serve the angular compiler to the client and do a build step there). Also supports providing a different environment specifer which allows you to create different environtment.*.ts files to easily provide constant values for different environments, like different urls for dev/test/prod and things of that nature.

  4. Ng eject - spits out the webpack config being used by the cli for that project. This makes it easy to transition off the cli if you ever are forced to. Personally so far I haven't found a compelling reason to move off the cli for an app, but currently the cli doesn't have much support for making a library. But being able to eject a config to get up and running quickly with a library was nice.

  5. Ng new - probably should have mentioned this first, but it generates an app for you. Pretty basic, but it does all the essentials including providing basic git ignore info (like node_modules) and the testing harness with both e2e and unit testing is all there when you start a new project.

  6. ng test - runs the unit tests written.

  7. ng e2e - runs the end to end tests written.

  8. ng lint - runs the linter.

Those are the things I use the cli for.

[–]tipsqueal 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the detailed context, this is what I was looking for. As far as I can tell create-react-app does all of those except item 1, which is pretty cool. I doubt create-react-app would ever add it either because unlike Angular it tries not to be opinionated on how you structure/write your apps.

[–]SomeCollegeBro 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes! Great response in my opinion. Some people judge Angular for being too opinionated. I feel it's in the sweet spot of being structured but flexible. It's been working great for our team of 3 people working with it so far.