11 ms·

This rapid pace of major releases is a little scary. We're stuck running Angular 1.x because there's no reasonable upgrade path for us. We're a .NET shop and re

by Yabood 9y ago

This rapid pace of major releases is a little scary. We're stuck running Angular 1.x because there's no reasonable upgrade path for us. We're a .NET shop and really like Angular, but after the 2.x cluster fuck, we're now thinking about going with something else entirely.

k__ 9y ago
Could be worth your while to look into Cycle.js It's written in TypeScript and, like Ng2, also heavily based on observables
- TheWiseOne 9y ago
  Second this. It takes a little getting used to but CycleJS is worth a definite look.
sixbrx 9y ago
The 2+ updates are really more like point releases which might add some features and/or break some things here and there, but are in no way comparable to the huge 1.x -> 2 "just rewrite it all" jump. Naming matters though, since the Angular ebook I was reading saw fit to end update support at 2.x and not support 4+, even though there's not much difference from what I can see.
pythonaut_16 9y ago
Vue.js can be a good option for shops coming from Angular 1.x.
- IgorPartola 9y ago
  This. Vue feels a lot like Angular 1, but gets more stuff right. Angular 2 feels like an over engineered React clone using more complex tech to solve the same problems. I also really dislike JSX so I am biased.
  - superasn 9y ago
    I am in the same boat as you. I was in love with Angular 1 and when Angular 2 was announced I was very much disappointed. There was not one redeeming things about A2 IMO, just a huge clusterfuck which is still growing with every version. Also never liked React. The whole JSX and everything is just isn't for my taste. I'm speaking as a solopreneur who likes launching a new site every month. Anyway, so a friend suggested Vue and this framework brought me actual joy. It is everything I was hoping to see in Angular 2 and better. Seriously, if you like A1 but not a fan of A2 or React then Vue is definitely up your alley.
- ben_jones 9y ago
  I love Vue. I prefer it to React and Angular. But once you get to customizing your use-case (like adding Typescript, State management, or Design frameworks) you start relying on increasingly smaller projects with less and less "maturity". For example I make heavy use of the vue-typed library[1] but it has 47 stars and two contributors. [1]:https://github.com/vue-typed/vue-typed https://github.com/vue-typed/vue-typed
  - pythonaut_16 9y ago
    Typescript support is supposed to be greatly improved in Vue 2.5 and is a continuing priority afaik.
  - mmcnl 9y ago
    That's true, but I dislike "essential" third-party projects anyway. Part of the reason I like Vue so much is because of the "official" Vue + vuex + vue-router combo (for React you have to use third-party libraries for state management and routing).
- adventurer 9y ago
  When Angular 1 was left for dead I went to Knockout. I think it is very similar and also very simple to use.
  - xab9 9y ago
    KO is long dead, but I kinda liked it. After ko and angular 1 I felt right at home with Vue.
    - adventurer 9y ago
      It's dead because no one uses it anymore? It had a stable release in March.
- mmcnl 9y ago
  I don't get why people say this. Vue and Angular 1.x are only similar when you're comparing the templating engines. But how much of the work migrating to React or Vue actually involves porting the view? I think that's not a very substantial amount compared to the application logic. I've worked with all three, and I would say that Vue and React are for more similar than Angular and Vue.
Glyptodon 9y ago
It's not just Angular. To me it feels like everything in the JS world releases way faster than it's reasonable to keep up with these days.
- tptacek 9y ago
  People say this a lot. But the React you write in 2017 is pretty close to the React you'd have written the year the framework was released.
  - themihai 9y ago
    Give it one more year....
    - rpastuszak 9y ago
      Why?
  - Retozi 9y ago
    I agree. I exlusively write React Frontends since 2014, and very minor things have changed. It feels a lot more stable than before, where every project had homegrown framework stuff on top of backbone.js or jquery, or then using ember.js. There was just an awful lot of difficult discussion on how to design event-bus abstractions, global state management and general architecture To me it feels like the frontend ecosystem has stabilized a lot, since the react paradigm is very robust and versatile. For most difficult problems, the solution is somewhat clear. Sometimes more, sometimes less elegant, but at least the timeconsuming disussions have become less frequent within a team
  - kevan 9y ago
    Most of my pain with the React ecosystem happened when people kept rebuilding react-router every 6 months. I managed one upgrade, but after that we gave up and stuck with the old version because it worked well for our purposes.
    - 9y ago
eric_b 9y ago
Angular 2 will not help your team deliver valuable web experiences to customers any more quickly or reliably than Angular 1. Probably almost certainly the opposite. I'd argue most teams, if they're willing to go all-in on an SPA framework (which for most apps is a waste of time and money imo) would be better off with React + TSX. Edit: Vue is probably closer to the "Angular way" with databinding, but component to component communication really needs something additional like Vuex. So, really, just use React/Redux and you'll get a bigger community with more real-world apps being built with the tooling.
- ergo14 9y ago
  You can go Polymer 2.x or Vue 2.x both feel similar to angular 1.5 `component()` approach. React might be a nice option too but it is probably requires more different way of thinking than the former options.
- cc81 9y ago
  React+MobX would probably be an easier transition and MobX is easy enough to learn and pretty popular.
- pygy_ 9y ago
  Vue has one big advantage over React for an Angular shop: the views are often trivial to port, while JSX is further syntactically from Angular templates.
  - jrs95 9y ago
    IMO the difference in the quantity and quality of packages available for React more than makes up for that difference.
    - wcarron 9y ago
      I would say that Vue's core libraries are very well put together. Vuex, Vue-router, vue-resource, vue-axios, etc are all simple and easy to use. Personally, I wouldn't say either community has better supporting libs than the other.
merpnderp 9y ago
Vue + Vuex is where we went after Angular 1.x. We're also a C# shop and felt burned by the Angular 2+ changes. We worked with React and really liked it, but it was hard to bring on new devs quickly. Vue is a lot like Angular with data binding, only about a million times easier to get going than React. Vue + Vuex (feels like a really well thought out Mobx) + Vue-Router and you'll be knocking out slick looking web apps in no time. Also the vue-cli is like a gift from a more intelligent Javascript writing species.
avenoir 9y ago
We were in the exact same position and ended up converting to react to escape another potential clusterfuck with angular. This was despite the fact that I enjoyed angular very much but as you said it is certainly scary from business perspective.
perseusprime11 9y ago
I hear you. What's causing them to iterate so fast? I still remember the days of Java and .Net where they did yearly releases and phased transitions with good documentation of what's deprecated and what's new.
- pbowyer 9y ago
  > and phased transitions with good documentation of what's deprecated and what's new. If you're after that >> https://emberjs.com https://emberjs.com
  - perseusprime11 9y ago
    Agreed. Ember does a great job with documentation.
- lloyd-christmas 9y ago
  > phased transitions with good documentation of what's deprecated and what's new. Am I missing something? Do they not have that? This is just a blog post. They have a changelog and utilize the @deprecated jsdoc tag for IDE notification.
mcescalante 9y ago
From a purely technical standpoint, the upgrade path from AngularJS to Angular seems better thought out than some things I've had to handle before - you can run the 2 in one Angular app as you upgrade pieces and there is a whole library aimed at easing some of the annoyances of upgrading. https://angular.io/guide/upgrade https://angular.io/guide/upgrade
- merb 9y ago
  you can't run on aot than (at least if you use the ng cli)
  - ZoeZoeBee 9y ago
    Hasn't been the case for months
jboggan 9y ago
There are plenty of teams inside of Google stuck on Angular 1.x
gramstrong 9y ago
This isn't v5 of "Angular" though, this is more v4 of Angular 2. Angular 2 became just "Angular" a while back, and Angular 1 became "AngularJS", I suppose to distinguish them as two separate products. There really isn't much going on between major releases as their confusing dichotomy would have you believe.
- yawz 9y ago
  Actually it's v3 of Angular 2 :), as we never had Angular 3.
karmajunkie 9y ago
I've just (as in, 5 minutes ago) deployed an application that we upgraded from angular 1.x (originally 1.2, up through 1.5) to angular 4 using ng-upgrade. I've also got another application that I've migrated over to react from angular 1.3. I'm a fan of react. I appreciate the component-based approach, and it really addresses a lot of my complaints about angular.js. If I was starting an application from scratch, I'm almost certainly going to use react or maybe preact for it. However, having been through this process, if angular had been as far along as it is now when I began the migration process on app 2 (angular.js -> react) I would have almost certainly opted to go with angular instead. Its not perfect, I still have my complaints with it (promises? observables? make up your effing mind already gang) but the migration path wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. NgUpgrade is pretty good and gives you a path forward, and I think you'll find once you're in it that mostly, your angular 1.x stuff will be a fairly straightforward migration to angular whereas you're going to be doing more of a rewrite with react. I've arguably lost a year of time where I wasn't able to deploy significant new features while I got the full UI ported to react to make a clean release. That's valuable time I wish I could get back. (Its more complicated than that, but things usually are…) TL;DR—Upgrade to Angular, its good enough that you get 80% of the improvements you'd feel moving to react or something else and you can preserve momentum.
- veidr 9y ago
  Are you able to share any notable trimphs or tragedies that arose when using ng-upgrade to go from AngularJS 1.x → Angular 4? On a scale of absolute clusterfuck to divine epiphany, how did you find that process in general? Did you leave the app running in a hybrid state with both frameworks bootstrapped, and if so for how long and how much did it suck? (I always ask people about when the topic comes up here, but I am hungry for tales recent real-world experience! We will be doing this soon, I think...)
  - karmajunkie 9y ago
    I did have a bit of a chest-thumping moment when I got routers from both versions playing nicely within the same app. Other than that though, it's been fairly devoid of spectacle (just the way I like it.) Most of my complications have arisen from the fact that this was my first project to get my hands dirty with typescript (which, on the whole, I found to be a really nice improvement) and there was an afternoon of headscratching while I was trying to figure out whether to be using observables or promises or both (for good or ill, I'm using both in various places right now.) My migration path was to take a small new feature and implement it in Angular, but mounted with an angular.js template. That let me prove out the practicality of it on a big-picture basis. The next bit was to implement a larger area of the application and then get both routers working alongside each other. Then some refactoring, moving some of the bits I'd just finished into their own modules (before this, I was putting everything into the application module, which was getting crowded fast.) So now I have new routes in the submodules and I'm just mounting new features that way. We're converting other modules as time permits but I suspect we'll have both coexisting alongside each other for quite a while yet. As long as maintenance on the older parts of the app is pretty limited, I don't really think its too bad. This isn't an app that's a labor of love or anything—the old stuff is working ok, and when something comes up that demands a lot of work in there, we'll convert it at that point.
at-fates-hands 9y ago
Agreed. I work in a large health care organization and they decided a two years ago to jump on the Angular bandwagon. Well, after some serious growing pains they were able to get it to work. One of the major issues was the "executives" just paid a hefty fee to bring in AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) and anything the teams wanted to do had to be able to integrate with AEM. I won't bore with the details, but it was painful. After a long journey to get those issues solved, the Angular team came out and said they were going in a totally different direction for Angular 2. One of my responsibilities was to write up a migration path to 1.5, and then how to eventually make a full migration to 2. Yeah, after I told upper management about the rapid release cycle, they just about choked. No way an org this big can move that fast. At this point, any future projects won't have it and we're in legacy support already for three other projects who did use it. In short, Angular in all forms is dead here, which is sad.
skydv 9y ago
Angular still is the best out there, not much choice, tbh
JTenerife 9y ago
Last year in August I left Angular because of the v2 nightmare. So, that's over a year ago. I think they've learned from it. Came back for v4 and never had an issue with it being immature.

by Yabood 9y ago

k__ 9y ago

Could be worth your while to look into Cycle.js It's written in TypeScript and, like Ng2, also heavily based on observables

TheWiseOne 9y ago
Second this. It takes a little getting used to but CycleJS is worth a definite look.

sixbrx 9y ago

The 2+ updates are really more like point releases which might add some features and/or break some things here and there, but are in no way comparable to the huge 1.x -> 2 "just rewrite it all" jump. Naming matters though, since the Angular ebook I was reading saw fit to end update support at 2.x and not support 4+, even though there's not much difference from what I can see.

pythonaut_16 9y ago

Vue.js can be a good option for shops coming from Angular 1.x.

IgorPartola 9y ago
This. Vue feels a lot like Angular 1, but gets more stuff right. Angular 2 feels like an over engineered React clone using more complex tech to solve the same problems. I also really dislike JSX so I am biased.
- superasn 9y ago
  I am in the same boat as you. I was in love with Angular 1 and when Angular 2 was announced I was very much disappointed. There was not one redeeming things about A2 IMO, just a huge clusterfuck which is still growing with every version. Also never liked React. The whole JSX and everything is just isn't for my taste. I'm speaking as a solopreneur who likes launching a new site every month. Anyway, so a friend suggested Vue and this framework brought me actual joy. It is everything I was hoping to see in Angular 2 and better. Seriously, if you like A1 but not a fan of A2 or React then Vue is definitely up your alley.
ben_jones 9y ago
I love Vue. I prefer it to React and Angular. But once you get to customizing your use-case (like adding Typescript, State management, or Design frameworks) you start relying on increasingly smaller projects with less and less "maturity". For example I make heavy use of the vue-typed library[1] but it has 47 stars and two contributors. [1]:https://github.com/vue-typed/vue-typed https://github.com/vue-typed/vue-typed
- pythonaut_16 9y ago
  Typescript support is supposed to be greatly improved in Vue 2.5 and is a continuing priority afaik.
- mmcnl 9y ago
  That's true, but I dislike "essential" third-party projects anyway. Part of the reason I like Vue so much is because of the "official" Vue + vuex + vue-router combo (for React you have to use third-party libraries for state management and routing).
adventurer 9y ago
When Angular 1 was left for dead I went to Knockout. I think it is very similar and also very simple to use.
- xab9 9y ago
  KO is long dead, but I kinda liked it. After ko and angular 1 I felt right at home with Vue.
  - adventurer 9y ago
    It's dead because no one uses it anymore? It had a stable release in March.
mmcnl 9y ago
I don't get why people say this. Vue and Angular 1.x are only similar when you're comparing the templating engines. But how much of the work migrating to React or Vue actually involves porting the view? I think that's not a very substantial amount compared to the application logic. I've worked with all three, and I would say that Vue and React are for more similar than Angular and Vue.

Glyptodon 9y ago

It's not just Angular. To me it feels like everything in the JS world releases way faster than it's reasonable to keep up with these days.

tptacek 9y ago
People say this a lot. But the React you write in 2017 is pretty close to the React you'd have written the year the framework was released.
- themihai 9y ago
  Give it one more year....
  - rpastuszak 9y ago
    Why?
- Retozi 9y ago
  I agree. I exlusively write React Frontends since 2014, and very minor things have changed. It feels a lot more stable than before, where every project had homegrown framework stuff on top of backbone.js or jquery, or then using ember.js. There was just an awful lot of difficult discussion on how to design event-bus abstractions, global state management and general architecture To me it feels like the frontend ecosystem has stabilized a lot, since the react paradigm is very robust and versatile. For most difficult problems, the solution is somewhat clear. Sometimes more, sometimes less elegant, but at least the timeconsuming disussions have become less frequent within a team
- kevan 9y ago
  Most of my pain with the React ecosystem happened when people kept rebuilding react-router every 6 months. I managed one upgrade, but after that we gave up and stuck with the old version because it worked well for our purposes.
  - 9y ago

eric_b 9y ago

Angular 2 will not help your team deliver valuable web experiences to customers any more quickly or reliably than Angular 1. Probably almost certainly the opposite. I'd argue most teams, if they're willing to go all-in on an SPA framework (which for most apps is a waste of time and money imo) would be better off with React + TSX. Edit: Vue is probably closer to the "Angular way" with databinding, but component to component communication really needs something additional like Vuex. So, really, just use React/Redux and you'll get a bigger community with more real-world apps being built with the tooling.

ergo14 9y ago
You can go Polymer 2.x or Vue 2.x both feel similar to angular 1.5 `component()` approach. React might be a nice option too but it is probably requires more different way of thinking than the former options.
cc81 9y ago
React+MobX would probably be an easier transition and MobX is easy enough to learn and pretty popular.
pygy_ 9y ago
Vue has one big advantage over React for an Angular shop: the views are often trivial to port, while JSX is further syntactically from Angular templates.
- jrs95 9y ago
  IMO the difference in the quantity and quality of packages available for React more than makes up for that difference.
  - wcarron 9y ago
    I would say that Vue's core libraries are very well put together. Vuex, Vue-router, vue-resource, vue-axios, etc are all simple and easy to use. Personally, I wouldn't say either community has better supporting libs than the other.

merpnderp 9y ago

Vue + Vuex is where we went after Angular 1.x. We're also a C# shop and felt burned by the Angular 2+ changes. We worked with React and really liked it, but it was hard to bring on new devs quickly. Vue is a lot like Angular with data binding, only about a million times easier to get going than React. Vue + Vuex (feels like a really well thought out Mobx) + Vue-Router and you'll be knocking out slick looking web apps in no time. Also the vue-cli is like a gift from a more intelligent Javascript writing species.

avenoir 9y ago

We were in the exact same position and ended up converting to react to escape another potential clusterfuck with angular. This was despite the fact that I enjoyed angular very much but as you said it is certainly scary from business perspective.

perseusprime11 9y ago

I hear you. What's causing them to iterate so fast? I still remember the days of Java and .Net where they did yearly releases and phased transitions with good documentation of what's deprecated and what's new.

pbowyer 9y ago
> and phased transitions with good documentation of what's deprecated and what's new. If you're after that >> https://emberjs.com https://emberjs.com
- perseusprime11 9y ago
  Agreed. Ember does a great job with documentation.
lloyd-christmas 9y ago
> phased transitions with good documentation of what's deprecated and what's new. Am I missing something? Do they not have that? This is just a blog post. They have a changelog and utilize the @deprecated jsdoc tag for IDE notification.

mcescalante 9y ago

From a purely technical standpoint, the upgrade path from AngularJS to Angular seems better thought out than some things I've had to handle before - you can run the 2 in one Angular app as you upgrade pieces and there is a whole library aimed at easing some of the annoyances of upgrading. https://angular.io/guide/upgrade https://angular.io/guide/upgrade

merb 9y ago
you can't run on aot than (at least if you use the ng cli)
- ZoeZoeBee 9y ago
  Hasn't been the case for months

jboggan 9y ago

There are plenty of teams inside of Google stuck on Angular 1.x

gramstrong 9y ago

This isn't v5 of "Angular" though, this is more v4 of Angular 2. Angular 2 became just "Angular" a while back, and Angular 1 became "AngularJS", I suppose to distinguish them as two separate products. There really isn't much going on between major releases as their confusing dichotomy would have you believe.

yawz 9y ago
Actually it's v3 of Angular 2 :), as we never had Angular 3.

karmajunkie 9y ago

I've just (as in, 5 minutes ago) deployed an application that we upgraded from angular 1.x (originally 1.2, up through 1.5) to angular 4 using ng-upgrade. I've also got another application that I've migrated over to react from angular 1.3. I'm a fan of react. I appreciate the component-based approach, and it really addresses a lot of my complaints about angular.js. If I was starting an application from scratch, I'm almost certainly going to use react or maybe preact for it. However, having been through this process, if angular had been as far along as it is now when I began the migration process on app 2 (angular.js -> react) I would have almost certainly opted to go with angular instead. Its not perfect, I still have my complaints with it (promises? observables? make up your effing mind already gang) but the migration path wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. NgUpgrade is pretty good and gives you a path forward, and I think you'll find once you're in it that mostly, your angular 1.x stuff will be a fairly straightforward migration to angular whereas you're going to be doing more of a rewrite with react. I've arguably lost a year of time where I wasn't able to deploy significant new features while I got the full UI ported to react to make a clean release. That's valuable time I wish I could get back. (Its more complicated than that, but things usually are…) TL;DR—Upgrade to Angular, its good enough that you get 80% of the improvements you'd feel moving to react or something else and you can preserve momentum.

veidr 9y ago
Are you able to share any notable trimphs or tragedies that arose when using ng-upgrade to go from AngularJS 1.x → Angular 4? On a scale of absolute clusterfuck to divine epiphany, how did you find that process in general? Did you leave the app running in a hybrid state with both frameworks bootstrapped, and if so for how long and how much did it suck? (I always ask people about when the topic comes up here, but I am hungry for tales recent real-world experience! We will be doing this soon, I think...)
- karmajunkie 9y ago
  I did have a bit of a chest-thumping moment when I got routers from both versions playing nicely within the same app. Other than that though, it's been fairly devoid of spectacle (just the way I like it.) Most of my complications have arisen from the fact that this was my first project to get my hands dirty with typescript (which, on the whole, I found to be a really nice improvement) and there was an afternoon of headscratching while I was trying to figure out whether to be using observables or promises or both (for good or ill, I'm using both in various places right now.) My migration path was to take a small new feature and implement it in Angular, but mounted with an angular.js template. That let me prove out the practicality of it on a big-picture basis. The next bit was to implement a larger area of the application and then get both routers working alongside each other. Then some refactoring, moving some of the bits I'd just finished into their own modules (before this, I was putting everything into the application module, which was getting crowded fast.) So now I have new routes in the submodules and I'm just mounting new features that way. We're converting other modules as time permits but I suspect we'll have both coexisting alongside each other for quite a while yet. As long as maintenance on the older parts of the app is pretty limited, I don't really think its too bad. This isn't an app that's a labor of love or anything—the old stuff is working ok, and when something comes up that demands a lot of work in there, we'll convert it at that point.

at-fates-hands 9y ago

Agreed. I work in a large health care organization and they decided a two years ago to jump on the Angular bandwagon. Well, after some serious growing pains they were able to get it to work. One of the major issues was the "executives" just paid a hefty fee to bring in AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) and anything the teams wanted to do had to be able to integrate with AEM. I won't bore with the details, but it was painful. After a long journey to get those issues solved, the Angular team came out and said they were going in a totally different direction for Angular 2. One of my responsibilities was to write up a migration path to 1.5, and then how to eventually make a full migration to 2. Yeah, after I told upper management about the rapid release cycle, they just about choked. No way an org this big can move that fast. At this point, any future projects won't have it and we're in legacy support already for three other projects who did use it. In short, Angular in all forms is dead here, which is sad.

skydv 9y ago

Angular still is the best out there, not much choice, tbh

JTenerife 9y ago

Last year in August I left Angular because of the v2 nightmare. So, that's over a year ago. I think they've learned from it. Came back for v4 and never had an issue with it being immature.