5 ms·

Agree. Lots of money still being thrown at Drupal agencies.

by j_lev 11y ago

mschuster91 11y ago
Drupal at least provides you with a fast prototyping experience. Data fields for everything, and connectors to all kinds of external services, validated in some cases by years of production grade usage. Caching, databases, clustering, high-availability... All solved and mature. The only thing you don't get for free with Drupal is a backend which you can speak to if you're deciding to go the SPA route later on. Which, in my personal opinion, is a pretty stupid trend anyway. SPAs tend to grow to Java Enterprise levels of complexity very very fast, and things break All. The. Time. Not to mention you're putting huge amounts of work to the frontend, where you virtually cannot account for cross-browser behavior, people with multiple-year-old browsers... and people with devices older than two years! Leave a Drupal project idle and unmaintained for a year, and you'll be able to pick up where you left it. Good luck doing the same with an AngularJS SPA - you might get away if you used npm shrinkwrap when you left, but the first npm update WILL kill your code with a billion possible places to fix. Drupal is mature, and maturity is something that the entire Javascript development and tooling community is missing unless you stick to plain jQuery. Stability and reliability IS a thing, especially in enterprise. Go the hipster way when your target audience is hipsters, go the proven, old-school way when your target audience is enterprise. edit: ad maturity of Drupal and support... D6 got released in 2008-Q1 and support ended in 2016-Q1. That's EIGHT YEARS of continuous support and security fixes, and I expect similar if not better support timeframes for D7. Good luck finding a Backbone.js or Ember.js (and maybe even AngularJS) developer in four years from now; not to mention that during the entire D6/7 lifetime backwards-compatibility-breaking changes were a rarity in Drupal when all of the mentioned JS frameworks have had more than their fair share of clusterfucks stemming from bad design. Or just the tooling environment, breaking changes everywhere and (gut feeling) every month there's a new tool to learn or best practices revamped. Wonder why PHP, server-side rendering and SQL is so prevalent? You can rely on buying a solution and having support and developers even in multiple years from now. Enterprise doesn't want ever-changing piles of crap layered in more piles of crap, enterprise wants stability and maintainability. And enterprise is where the money is, not some SV startup only surviving on VC or with 90% of its customers startups only surviving on VC.
- UK-AL 11y ago
  Angular SPA applications ALWAYS seem really buggy for me. Freezes, and spinners that never go away and you have to refresh etc Maybe I just have bad luck.
  - _ao789 11y ago
    Or maybe you should not use IE5 for Mac to Dev in. Haha
  - wmil 11y ago
    Javascript SPA applications get less respect from business owners than they deserve. People see JS and throw their JQuery & some CSS developers at it. Or they use their backend PHP devs who've never written code that runs for longer than one request. Either way you end up with code written by people who don't understand some of the fundamentals of UI programming. Angular gets the worst of it because it's the most popular framework. It's exacerbated by the fact that Angular doesn't offer suggestions for a lot of common problems.
    - gaius 11y ago
      Angular is probably the bees knees if you are a Google employee but it makes little sense for anyone outside to bet the farm on it.
  - ihsw 11y ago
    I live and breathe Angular SPA applications -- the vast majority of developers that work with it cannot comprehend a well-designed and usable Angular application. Proper error handling, sane state management, and keeping the codepaths short and easily grok'd is very difficult with Angular -- especially for larger applications. This results in blackholes where users find themselves in strange spots that are inescapable other than a full page refresh. These are either developers dipping their toe into the front end after living in the back end of things their whole career, jQuery dudes hastily breaking into SPA development to stay afloat in an environment the submitted article exactly mentions, or simply lazy developers that couldn't be bothered due to tight deadlines/budget/whatever.

Agree. Lots of money still being thrown at Drupal agencies.

by j_lev 11y ago

Agree. Lots of money still being thrown at Drupal agencies.

Drupal at least provides you with a fast prototyping experience. Data fields for everything, and connectors to all kinds of external services, validated in some cases by years of production grade usage. Caching, databases, clustering, high-availability... All solved and mature. The only thing you don't get for free with Drupal is a backend which you can speak to if you're deciding to go the SPA route later on. Which, in my personal opinion, is a pretty stupid trend anyway. SPAs tend to grow to Java Enterprise levels of complexity very very fast, and things break All. The. Time. Not to mention you're putting huge amounts of work to the frontend, where you virtually cannot account for cross-browser behavior, people with multiple-year-old browsers... and people with devices older than two years! Leave a Drupal project idle and unmaintained for a year, and you'll be able to pick up where you left it. Good luck doing the same with an AngularJS SPA - you might get away if you used npm shrinkwrap when you left, but the first npm update WILL kill your code with a billion possible places to fix. Drupal is mature, and maturity is something that the entire Javascript development and tooling community is missing unless you stick to plain jQuery. Stability and reliability IS a thing, especially in enterprise. Go the hipster way when your target audience is hipsters, go the proven, old-school way when your target audience is enterprise. edit: ad maturity of Drupal and support... D6 got released in 2008-Q1 and support ended in 2016-Q1. That's EIGHT YEARS of continuous support and security fixes, and I expect similar if not better support timeframes for D7. Good luck finding a Backbone.js or Ember.js (and maybe even AngularJS) developer in four years from now; not to mention that during the entire D6/7 lifetime backwards-compatibility-breaking changes were a rarity in Drupal when all of the mentioned JS frameworks have had more than their fair share of clusterfucks stemming from bad design. Or just the tooling environment, breaking changes everywhere and (gut feeling) every month there's a new tool to learn or best practices revamped. Wonder why PHP, server-side rendering and SQL is so prevalent? You can rely on buying a solution and having support and developers even in multiple years from now. Enterprise doesn't want ever-changing piles of crap layered in more piles of crap, enterprise wants stability and maintainability. And enterprise is where the money is, not some SV startup only surviving on VC or with 90% of its customers startups only surviving on VC.

UK-AL 11y ago
Angular SPA applications ALWAYS seem really buggy for me. Freezes, and spinners that never go away and you have to refresh etc Maybe I just have bad luck.
- _ao789 11y ago
  Or maybe you should not use IE5 for Mac to Dev in. Haha
- wmil 11y ago
  Javascript SPA applications get less respect from business owners than they deserve. People see JS and throw their JQuery & some CSS developers at it. Or they use their backend PHP devs who've never written code that runs for longer than one request. Either way you end up with code written by people who don't understand some of the fundamentals of UI programming. Angular gets the worst of it because it's the most popular framework. It's exacerbated by the fact that Angular doesn't offer suggestions for a lot of common problems.
  - gaius 11y ago
    Angular is probably the bees knees if you are a Google employee but it makes little sense for anyone outside to bet the farm on it.
- ihsw 11y ago
  I live and breathe Angular SPA applications -- the vast majority of developers that work with it cannot comprehend a well-designed and usable Angular application. Proper error handling, sane state management, and keeping the codepaths short and easily grok'd is very difficult with Angular -- especially for larger applications. This results in blackholes where users find themselves in strange spots that are inescapable other than a full page refresh. These are either developers dipping their toe into the front end after living in the back end of things their whole career, jQuery dudes hastily breaking into SPA development to stay afloat in an environment the submitted article exactly mentions, or simply lazy developers that couldn't be bothered due to tight deadlines/budget/whatever.