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Angular Material 1 will enter a maintenance mode

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31–40 of 56 posts

Re: Angular Material 1 will enter a maintenance mode

#31
post #22

Angular Material is still missing a few essentials, but it is a good idea to speed up work on Material 2 now. Angular 2 will be out soon and many people will be unable to switch until Material 2 has caught up with the original.

Doing that takes somewhat of a leap of faith. Why would one believe that, a year from now, we won't be in the situation of "Angular Material 2 is still missing a few essentials, but it is a good idea to speed up work on Material 3 now. Angular 3 will be out soon and many people will be unable to switch until Material 3 has caught up with the original." ? If one fears that, it may be better to switch to another librar…

I am also a bit afraid about the future of Angular, primarily because the Angular team is working on way too many projects that sometimes seem needlessly complex. I don't think anyone could pick this up for Google if they dropped the ball on Angular. A hypothetical Angular 3 worries me less. The bulk of the differences between Angular 1 and Angular 2 come down to making use of technical improvements to JavaScript itself. There will be further changes in the future, but nothing as radical as modules, classes and the different asynchronous-related features.

I also hope it will become somewhat easier to switch from Angular 2 to a different framework or from Material 2 to a different UI framework, because the new JavaScript language features create obvious best practice solutions where frameworks previously had to come up with their own conventions.

Re: Angular Material 1 will enter a maintenance mode

#32
post #20
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think removing the word "deprecated" would go a long way towards making the title less misleading.

Well deprecated may not be exactly the right word, but there's not a single word that is totally accurate. Maybe "sunsetting"? :P

That's essentially what deprecated means. It is discouraged to start new projects with it. It doesn't mean that it's dead, but we seem to always take it that way.

Re: Angular Material 1 will enter a maintenance mode

#34
post #12

By just simply closing Issues/PRs and not engaging the community better, lots of developers are going to be reluctant to invest time/effort in using Angular Material 2 due to the potential of a future Angular Material 3 surge.

Not just that, but if you've tried to write a serious project using Material 1 (I have), you'll know just how incomplete and feature-lacking Material 1 is. I personally would never touch Material again. Not in the next 3 years at the very minimum.

When I realized that the sidemenu on the Angular Material documentation site was not actually made with Angular Material.... that's when I realized I made a bad decision in using it.

Re: Angular Material 1 will enter a maintenance mode

#35
post #4

The title is misleading, discussion linked has a clear explanation: > You are correct that many valid issues/bugs have been closed without resolution. > Our team simply does not have time to address all issues AND build Angular Material 2. (This is what we have consistently stated in our Forum posts). > We welcome community leadership with Pull Requests. Often those PRs have side affects, their scope of changes is to…

I understand closing PRs if they're complicated and out of scope, but closing issues doesn't make sense. These bugs don't go away just because the primary developers are leaving.

Closed issues don't go away. Lots of bugs are edge conditions that not enough people care about for the developers to ever pay any attention to fixing. They fall under the category of "sure, and if you submit a PR, we'll merge it". I imagine there's also issues for architectural problems with 1.x which will never, ever get fixed because nobody will be willing to spent the time massively refactoring the codebase. From a developer perspective its pointless to keep those open.

How you feel about this probably depends on if you're a user or developer. If you're a developer you view the issue tracker as a TODO list. If you're literally never going to bother fixing an issue, its best to just close it and move on.

Users seem to view issue trackers as defect trackers and believe that bugs should stay open until they're fixed.

Re: Angular Material 1 will enter a maintenance mode

#36
post #4

The title is misleading, discussion linked has a clear explanation: > You are correct that many valid issues/bugs have been closed without resolution. > Our team simply does not have time to address all issues AND build Angular Material 2. (This is what we have consistently stated in our Forum posts). > We welcome community leadership with Pull Requests. Often those PRs have side affects, their scope of changes is to…

I apologize, but there's only so much you can do in 80 character titles. It was not my intention to be unclear.

When you:

* Move all of your developers / resources from Project A to Project B

* On the page for Project A you state "Project A development efforts are focused on bug fixes and minor improvements."

* THEN you go and close a bunch of valid even minor / easily fixed bugs (ex https://github.com/angular/material/issues/1659) and PRs stating "This issue is closed as part of our Project B efforts."

...it's my opinion that Project A is now deprecated, even if they don't expressly state that it is.

Re: Angular Material 1 will enter a maintenance mode

#37
post #18

I am the author of a slightly popular CSS library [1] and JS library [2] and I feel the pain explained here, trying to keep up the pace of issues and PR is daunting. However, cmon Google! You are not a sole developer lost somewhere in Spain. Get your act together and really support your own libraries for a sensible amount of time. Or hire more people to do so. [1] http://picnicss.com/ [2] http://umbrellajs.com/

Not sure if sarcastic or serious. It seems to me that a major problem for Open Source in 2016 is assumption of support from the originating entity or person. Does this base assumption not risk alienating individuals and organisations into saying, "Should I release this at all?". Why should they hire people to support something which generates, as far as I can see, no revenue for Google?

> Why should they hire people to support something which generates, as far as I can see, no revenue for Google?

The reason most companies release projects open source for free is that they created them to solve a problem for themselves, but want to benefit from community contributions. Google's ease of abandon suggests they are not really using this library internally.

Re: Angular Material 1 will enter a maintenance mode

#38
I truly feel sorry for those who started learning web development somewhere between 2009 and 2014.

During that time, it seems like what would be accepted as the new standard for creating web applications was completely up for grabs. You had Angular, Backbone, Ember, and probably many others that just didn't get noticed.

Can you imagine being a new developer during this time, trying to learn how to create a web application with no prior knowledge?

When I started getting serious about this in 2006 or so, it was difficult enough just learning the basics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and how everything worked together. I have been into computers and programming my entire life, had learned C and a few other languages, and it still took me years to become an intermediate 'full-stack' developer. Again this is before any of these MVC frameworks were out.

I think the main problem comes in when you try to engineer a completely new standard on top of an already existing standard.

Whatever happened to using servers and browsers as they were meant to be used? Why are we constantly trying to reinvent the standard and giving these libraries which make everything more complicated attention? Is the reduction in requests to the server by having everything on client side really that beneficial with today's computing power and language capabilities (Golang http://marcio.io/2015/07/handling-1-million-requests-per-min...)? The logic here escapes me.

Angular wants you to basically use a new language and web architecture, complete with hundreds of pages of documentation specific to Angular, on top of the standard. I didn't hear about Angular Material until now, and it's even more mind boggling - are we trying to have every site look and function just like the Google platform now? There's already a standard for that - no styling on inputs (granted it will look different from browser to browser).

Luckily though, after half a decade, it seems like the community has a better understanding of what would be best and the tools have been built for it. I think in the near future, we'll see Golang and React take the lead in their respective areas of web development.

Re: Angular Material 1 will enter a maintenance mode

#39

I am the author of a slightly popular CSS library [1] and JS library [2] and I feel the pain explained here, trying to keep up the pace of issues and PR is daunting. However, cmon Google! You are not a sole developer lost somewhere in Spain. Get your act together and really support your own libraries for a sensible amount of time. Or hire more people to do so. [1] http://picnicss.com/ [2] http://umbrellajs.com/

support and google in the same sentence do not go well together

I'm finding I get excellent service on the products I pay for.

Re: Angular Material 1 will enter a maintenance mode

#40

I truly feel sorry for those who started learning web development somewhere between 2009 and 2014. During that time, it seems like what would be accepted as the new standard for creating web applications was completely up for grabs. You had Angular, Backbone, Ember, and probably many others that just didn't get noticed. Can you imagine being a new developer during this time, trying to learn how to create a web applic…

2009-2014 is a huge timeframe for the web, as mobile compatibility became increasingly important.

Seven years from now we'll probably be talking about how much the web changed for VR/AR - or something new altogether.

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