4 ms·

I've been writing Angular on Rails for the last year. We took a bag of jQuery code which manipulated DOM for a complex single-page app. We threw that all away a

I've been writing Angular on Rails for the last year. We took a bag of jQuery code which manipulated DOM for a complex single-page app. We threw that all away and replaced it with 90% less Angular code. It felt (not to trot out a stale trope) like magic and we never looked back. It was clear to us from day one that performance would be an area of concern, as well as the overall complexity of the framework. But those can be addressed. I don't agree that using another framework would magically prevent developers from thinking about performance issues. And many modules of angular we just don't use, and it doesn't impose those on us. On a regular basis we re-evaluate alternatives: React, knockout, backbone, and so on. I expect those might involve tradeoffs that end up being positive or neutral for us, even it just forces a re-thinking of the app architecture. But this article doesn't make any recommendation or even mention the initial problem of rich, single-page apps that create user interactivity without page reloads. And the painting of the framework as Java and Enterprise do not match our experience or use case. I'm the first in line for recommendations on how we can improve what we do, but my impression is his bias is throw away frameworks and bring back our mass of raw javascript.

EGreg 12y ago
I think besides ng-repeat, angular is pretty much like any other two-way template binding framework. I don't know why it's really considered so radically different and special. It's when you get controllers such as ng-repeat that Angular's digest cycle makes some difference. But ultimately you could write a component like ng-repeat yourself. As for where you place the directives -- the tag name or attributes, inside the class -- who cares? Only the {{}} in the text nodes matters strongly. As for alternatives, check out http://platform.qbix.com http://platform.qbix.com . It is compatible with angular, ember, jquery etc. But it is much more straightforward, like react. You only have two concepts - pages and tools (components). And you can not only re-use a whole lot of tools from a marketplace but they all can work with a standard opensource platform of user accounts, realtime streams of data, which can distribute the social layer the same way bitcoin distributes money and contracts.
- joewood 12y ago
  Agreed, even ng-repeat has equivalents in each framework. Migrating from direct DOM manipulation is a no-brainer, but I wouldn't count it as an advantage of Angular over the other choices.
DougBTX 12y ago
Ending up with a code base which is 10% of the size of the original is a massive improvement, can you share some examples of what the code was doing before? Even cutting down by 50% would be impressive.
- jasonwocky 12y ago
  Not to discount the value added in this case, but remember that the report is possibly biased in the same way that many "We rewrote it and now its 10x as awesome as it was before!" reports are. Rewrites almost always tend to result in higher quality code, regardless of what the rewrite is to or from.
slantyyz 12y ago
I did something similar with a couple of my projects. Our apps had a soup of Jquery, Backbone, Backbone Marionette and a bunch of other libraries, and while we didn't get 90% less code (more like 70-75%), I feel it was a worthwhile migration. The overall structure of our code base is simpler. Angular does have its annoyances and compromises, and in some areas, it's kind of a pig (i.e., ng-repeat). Our projects aren't massive in scope (they're targeted towards small enterprise implementations), however, so I don't think Angular's limitations will really hit us hard except in certain use cases.
nkg 12y ago
+1 !

EGreg 12y ago

I think besides ng-repeat, angular is pretty much like any other two-way template binding framework. I don't know why it's really considered so radically different and special. It's when you get controllers such as ng-repeat that Angular's digest cycle makes some difference. But ultimately you could write a component like ng-repeat yourself. As for where you place the directives -- the tag name or attributes, inside the class -- who cares? Only the {{}} in the text nodes matters strongly. As for alternatives, check out http://platform.qbix.com http://platform.qbix.com . It is compatible with angular, ember, jquery etc. But it is much more straightforward, like react. You only have two concepts - pages and tools (components). And you can not only re-use a whole lot of tools from a marketplace but they all can work with a standard opensource platform of user accounts, realtime streams of data, which can distribute the social layer the same way bitcoin distributes money and contracts.

joewood 12y ago
Agreed, even ng-repeat has equivalents in each framework. Migrating from direct DOM manipulation is a no-brainer, but I wouldn't count it as an advantage of Angular over the other choices.

DougBTX 12y ago

Ending up with a code base which is 10% of the size of the original is a massive improvement, can you share some examples of what the code was doing before? Even cutting down by 50% would be impressive.

jasonwocky 12y ago
Not to discount the value added in this case, but remember that the report is possibly biased in the same way that many "We rewrote it and now its 10x as awesome as it was before!" reports are. Rewrites almost always tend to result in higher quality code, regardless of what the rewrite is to or from.

slantyyz 12y ago

I did something similar with a couple of my projects. Our apps had a soup of Jquery, Backbone, Backbone Marionette and a bunch of other libraries, and while we didn't get 90% less code (more like 70-75%), I feel it was a worthwhile migration. The overall structure of our code base is simpler. Angular does have its annoyances and compromises, and in some areas, it's kind of a pig (i.e., ng-repeat). Our projects aren't massive in scope (they're targeted towards small enterprise implementations), however, so I don't think Angular's limitations will really hit us hard except in certain use cases.

nkg 12y ago

+1 !