I'd add a few more thoughts. Keep your controllers lean and mean. Put more of the UI logic into services. This makes testing a lot easier. Only use routing

I'd add a few more thoughts. Keep your controllers lean and mean. Put more of the UI logic into services. This makes testing a lot easier. Only use routing ($route, $routeProvider) if your app has very little UI state and could reasonably thought of as several totally independent pages. I switched to managing $location.path() explicitly and haven't looked back. Embrace promises throughout your app. Angular templates can now render promises naturally but I've found that I prefer to be more explicit: $http.get(url).then(function(response) { $scope.something = response.data; }, function(error) { $scope.$emit('error', error); }); Wrapping jquery widgets in directives often results in more code than just doing it yourself. Obviously this increases your maintenance surface area but typically less than you would expect. The Angular Bootstrap project is trying to create directives that avoid jquery and could be bound (with different templates) to other UI frameworks. What I really want is a core set of UI widget directives and then separate (bootstrap or foundation inspired or not) CSS libraries for styling them.