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I have multiple friends who are very excited about Angular and one who is very excited about Knockout, so I am convinced that they are getting something right.

I have multiple friends who are very excited about Angular and one who is very excited about Knockout, so I am convinced that they are getting something right. I am personally much more attracted to the reactive style of Meteor's Blaze or ReactJS. It seems much easier for me to reason about, but maybe this has something to do with my background in video games which means that a render-loop seems really natural to me. I don't have enough real world experience with the former to make a comparison so I'd love to hear from someone who is able to properly compare the two styles what the real pros and cons are.

davedx 13y ago
I've worked on one large project with Angular, and a couple of medium sized ones in Meteor (using the original UI system) and am working on a POC project with ReactJS at the moment. I think Angular is better for "slightly more traditional" webapps such as dashboards. Its directives are nice for building small custom widgets, and the thin model wrappers $http and $resource can be useful (though I'm looking forward to what they add to these in v2.0). Data-binding is very straightforward and easy to understand. I've built a couple of projects in Meteor, and I'm still a fan, though I've yet to have a real use case for the realtime (pub/sub) stuff: I'm still making straightforward webapps that would probably be just as easy (if not easier) to build in Angular or Backbone. The reason I'm using Meteor is more for productivity than for reactive realtime: I love that I get Mongo, a watched asset pipeline and a bunch of other stuff for free. I love being able to share/move code around easily between the client and server. Sometimes the reactivity in Meteor can be quite subtle and difficult to get your head around, and I wish I was just using straightforward webservices instead; other times it's a productivity booster and keeps things simpler. ReactJS is a really nice concise view library, with some extra stuff that Facebook put in that I'm not sure should really be in there (e.g. the synthetic events) and should maybe be a module instead (an approach I'm very happy to see Angular taking). ReactJS does for views and templates what Meteor does for client-server. It's also got its share of subtleties and gotchas though. I'm also from a video games background and am also tending to favour Meteor and ReactJS. But I do think the extra power of these technologies brings an extra set of complexity and things to watch out for. But then Angular has transclusions, so......
- ianstormtaylor 13y ago
  Big +1 to Facebook breaking down React into smaller parts that are reusable. Makes it hard to point out where there are weaknesses in the library with the "all or nothing" system of dependencies.

davedx 13y ago

I've worked on one large project with Angular, and a couple of medium sized ones in Meteor (using the original UI system) and am working on a POC project with ReactJS at the moment. I think Angular is better for "slightly more traditional" webapps such as dashboards. Its directives are nice for building small custom widgets, and the thin model wrappers $http and $resource can be useful (though I'm looking forward to what they add to these in v2.0). Data-binding is very straightforward and easy to understand. I've built a couple of projects in Meteor, and I'm still a fan, though I've yet to have a real use case for the realtime (pub/sub) stuff: I'm still making straightforward webapps that would probably be just as easy (if not easier) to build in Angular or Backbone. The reason I'm using Meteor is more for productivity than for reactive realtime: I love that I get Mongo, a watched asset pipeline and a bunch of other stuff for free. I love being able to share/move code around easily between the client and server. Sometimes the reactivity in Meteor can be quite subtle and difficult to get your head around, and I wish I was just using straightforward webservices instead; other times it's a productivity booster and keeps things simpler. ReactJS is a really nice concise view library, with some extra stuff that Facebook put in that I'm not sure should really be in there (e.g. the synthetic events) and should maybe be a module instead (an approach I'm very happy to see Angular taking). ReactJS does for views and templates what Meteor does for client-server. It's also got its share of subtleties and gotchas though. I'm also from a video games background and am also tending to favour Meteor and ReactJS. But I do think the extra power of these technologies brings an extra set of complexity and things to watch out for. But then Angular has transclusions, so......

ianstormtaylor 13y ago
Big +1 to Facebook breaking down React into smaller parts that are reusable. Makes it hard to point out where there are weaknesses in the library with the "all or nothing" system of dependencies.