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Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?

blog.backlift.com

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Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?

#31

Post by singular »

alanh wrote: post #26
singular wrote: post #23

I have used both in my startup job and vastly prefer angular to backbone, however I think it's not quite an apples to apples comparison as angular provides a lot more than backbone. That isn't meant as a criticism of backbone per se, rather I think they are actively going for different things - backbone makes it easy to achieve a client-side rendered single page website with MVC separation but lets you control actual…

After spending two or three months with Angular, I’m running away screaming. I really owe people a blog post about it, but basically, it’s hard to debug, weird for weird’s sake, and polluting of the HTML namespace. Death by a thousand cuts — and by disregard for best practice.

I'd be interested to read about your issues with it. It is definitely weird, but I don't think it's for its own sake, rather it's adding a new layer of abstraction which will always come off as a bit strange until you get used to it, e.g. lisp.

I've not had awful problems debugging it, certainly no more than any other js library spitting out "cannot read property 'foo' of null" all over the place with stack traces that give you no help, though I don't deny it can be a bitch.

I'm not sure I understand your point about polluting the HTML namespace - sure you can introduce new HTML tags which can conflict, but if you're careful it's not an issue (and you can choose what directives to make available in a given module.)

I think one key thing I'd say to newcomers to angular is that when it doesn't work it can be an absolute bitch to resolve problems, though you gradually adapt to its patterns over time and such pain reduces significantly.

Like I said in the grandmother* post I do think the positives outweigh the negatives. In fact, I think they MASSIVELY outweigh the negatives, easy 2-way data binding and the code/html reuse of directives alone are enough to make me love it, but hey I get where you're coming from on the painful aspects.

* A sad attempt at reducing sexism in tree analogies.

Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?

#33

Post by Justen »

tzaman wrote: post #20

We're currently undergoing a complete frontend re-write (after we have proved with prototype we can make money) using Angular and I must say it's been an emotional rollercoaster with plenty of love and hate, but at the end of the day, love wins hands down. I haven't used much Backbone, so you could say I'm biased, but the truth is that Angular really teaches HTML new tricks (directives) which can save you days (or we…

This library looks awesome. I made an angular service that does the same thing but it took a lot of effort. What's your blog url? I'll add it to my rss and keep a look out for when you add this in.

Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?

#34

Post by alanh »

singular wrote: post #31
alanh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After spending two or three months with Angular, I’m running away screaming. I really owe people a blog post about it, but basically, it’s hard to debug, weird for weird’s sake, and polluting of the HTML namespace. Death by a thousand cuts — and by disregard for best practice.

I'd be interested to read about your issues with it. It is definitely weird , but I don't think it's for its own sake, rather it's adding a new layer of abstraction which will always come off as a bit strange until you get used to it, e.g. lisp. I've not had awful problems debugging it, certainly no more than any other js library spitting out "cannot read property 'foo' of null" all over the place with stack traces t…

I do love having easy two-way data binding, too, certainly.

To clarify: When you use a directive with an "isolate scope", you have to pass it parameters in your template, which means using arbitrary "HTML attributes" in ways that do not, in fact, have anything to do with HTML attributes. E.g.:

Is it plausible that HTML eventually defines a meaning for `model` and/or `compact` attributes? Did you just write illegal HTML? Yes. Is there already a way to do this in HTML? Yes, the `data-*` attribute namespace is free to use.

The whole dirty-checking thing requires an insane amount of CPU work, sometimes. Once you’re doing 15 or 20 AJAX requests, your browser may use 100% CPU for minutes (and that’s on desktop)! Why? We aren’t exactly sure. But I have bumped into other people at local JS meetups who have experienced the same thing. (Their solution? Give up and use Backbone. Ours? Load fewer things. I think it may also be viable to do all your network requests out of the Angular context to avoid a full dirty-check cycle on each `readyStateChange` event, but that’s not entirely straightforward, either, since we used Angular services to create our models, which know how to load their own dependencies… ack… it’s a mess.)

Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?

#35

Post by na85 »

angersock wrote: post #32

Am I the only one whose brain was unable to parse the graphs as the article went on? By the time I hit the blue-orange switching diagram (for that's what it most closely resembled), I was fairly sure that I was being put on by the authors.

An object lesson in presentation vs. utility. UX/UI designers take note.

The graph itself looks very neat. But as a medium for conveying information it's fucking useless.

Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?

#36

Post by grobmeier »

davidw wrote: post #29
lucidrains wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were you trying to do?

http://www.grobmeier.de/angular-js-binding-to-jquery-ui-date... Sums up what I wanted to do. I think in this particular instance things have moved on and it may be easy these days, but thinking about what would have happened if I'd had to figure out that code myself, I could envision spending a day or two figuring out how to add something that is a one-liner in jQuery. It made me nervous about "unknown unknowns", too…

Funny to see my own blog post as a reference here, thank you.

On topic, it actually took me a while to figure out how it works. But now I understood it and similar problems later were solved in no time.

That said I think you need a while to really learn AngularJS before you should use it in your product. If you don't have the time then you might have a problem. You don't need to learn about the internals, which is good, but you definitely need to learn the core concepts.

Re: Angular or Backbone: what are startups using?

#38

Post by brodo »

wc- wrote: post #25
bravura wrote: post #21

How does Meteor fit in to all of this? Are no YC startups that you polled using it? Why not?

Currently using Meteor for my startup, I foresee scalability issues down the line (which the meteor devs are currently working on) but for cranking out a MVP its a pretty nice framework.

Are you doing any unit testing? I found Meteor to be a unit testing nightmare.
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