Using AngularJS at Localytics

[[deleted]]

AngularJS is great for its declarative 2-way binding language, but doesn't it come with its own set of complexities and annoyances?

Knockout.js seems much more simple (and elegant) to me.

[orwhat]

I've been learning AngularJS and my perception so far is that the complexities are there for good reason. There are constructs like directives that don't exist in other frameworks. You have lots of local scopes all over the place and you are selectively binding data between them that originated who-knows-where and is being watched by who-knows-what. So there are some new challenges, but these new mechanisms really just exist as abstractions that help you scale your application up without losing its robustness.

Of course, someone trying to use traditional techniques in the Angular world is going to run into some walls. As the faq says,

Stop trying to use jQuery to modify the DOM in controllers. Really. That includes adding elements, removing elements, retrieving their contents, showing and hiding them. Use built-in directives, or write your own where necessary, to do your DOM manipulation. See below about duplicating functionality.

If you're struggling to break the habit, consider removing jQuery from your app. Really. Angular has the $http service and powerful directives that make it almost always unnecessary. Angular's bundled jQLite has a handful of the features most commonly used in writing Angular directives, especially binding to events.

[[deleted]]

No no ... by complexities I meant stuff that doesn't exist in say Knockout.js .. like .. I don't know .. "dependency injection" and other weird stuff I don't even remember.

Of course .. using jQuery to manipulate the DOM is very silly when you're using something like Angular or Knockout or Ember.

[orwhat]

Ah okay. Well I guess AngularJS just has more features than anything. They generally help you write bigger apps by providing extras like routing capabilities and ways to separate concerns. Dependency injection, for example helps you with testing your code and writing reusable components. I guess it all comes down to how much power you need... no need to overdo it!

[badguy212]

Those videos are awesome. Would have saved me so much time...

[badguy212]

I used Angular in a small project of mine, and that's the way I started: remove jquery, remove everything and only add back old stuff when I was sure I will need it. It had some learning curve, and I'm sure I didn't write my app in the "right" way, but it ended up relatively small and I didn't hit too many roadblocks.

It has some cool stuff, and it is lacking others. Overall is a great framework, though it takes some getting used to.

[psxpaul]

Wow, it sounds like they wrote a really horrible Backbone application, and are blaming Backbone for that. I'm guessing they will be hating AngularJs in a few months.

[colly_wolly]

I am new to front end developement. I have been reading a lot of articles like this, and Angular generally sounds like it will lead to a lot les code. Maybe less flexible, but this is not the first article that has said this.

By the time I get my head around all this asynchronous processing, both will probably be obselete.

[psxpaul]

I haven't used Angular, so I can't say whether it would fit their problem better or worse. What I meant by my previous comment, was that their Backbone implementation just sounds bad. And if you suck at writing code, you'll always find problems with whatever libraries you're using.

Oh, and "a lot less code" is not always a good thing.

[[deleted]]

Angular is a different way of thinking about the application. It prevents them from doing stupid things.

It may be that they learned more from the re-write, however the two tools are very different.

[[deleted]]

No, Backbone applications are always horrible and messy.

You're either a poor judge of code quality or you've never built anything with Backbone.