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Why does Angular.js rock?

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Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#21

Post by andrewflnr »

sahrizv wrote: post #4

I am just starting up web development and have decided to use Django for backend. However, this Angular vs Ember comparisons have lowered my confidence as I think whatever choice "I" make, will turn out wrong in the long run. Can the experienced people here tell me what I should choose? I am fine with either style of approach to HTML(template vs declarative) and I just want a batteries included framework, which I can…

What kind of "batteries" are you looking to be included? Knockoutjs doesn't automate saving to the server (though it can do everything up to the Ajax call), and IMO it has a pretty intuitive model and near-perfect docs. As a recent convert, I would recommend that you consider it. Unless you've already rejected it for your own reasons, in which case I'm curious what those are.

PS: the tutorial does have a little opaque magic. IMO the biggest need in the docs is some overarching theory. The trick is that applyBindings applies to the whole document by default, but can be restricted to another DOM node.

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#22

Post by jacques_chester »

ErikAugust wrote: post #16

Good breakdown of some of the useful built-in directives as well as an easy-to-understand guide to creating a directive. Top commenter is definitely right that Angular's own docs create a cottage industry for bloggers and others willing to bang their heads against stuff until they figure it out. Just started an Angular directive that allows for reusable Flot charts: https://github.com/ErikAugust/flang I'll be adding…

There's something about those docs that seem to inspire blunt skull trauma analogies. Me the other day, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140406

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#23

Post by waterside81 »

Foxandxss wrote: post #12
jacques_chester wrote: post #5

Angular is god's gift to programming bloggers. The documentation is so famously patchy, contradictory and impenetrable that an entire cottage industry of talmudic literature has sprung up around it overnight. I've spent the last two weeks slicing and dicing the developer guide and all the directly related API documentation -- this one-page demo is better than the entire Angular tutorial. It also covers the most impor…

I totally agree with you. That is one of the reasons I created this blog. I am 24/7 in #angularjs in freenode and I see questions repeated over and over again. My goal is to write about those solutions we give to them so they won't need to ask again. On the other hand, my goal was to "sell" angular to the readers, not to scary them with $digest issues :) Said that, I have in my TODO things about this matter.

I'm quite experienced with JS, jQuery etc. but never really "got" what Angular was all about. This is the first time the light bulb went off - so thanks for a great write up.

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#24

Post by jacques_chester »

andrewflnr wrote: post #21
sahrizv wrote: post #4

I am just starting up web development and have decided to use Django for backend. However, this Angular vs Ember comparisons have lowered my confidence as I think whatever choice "I" make, will turn out wrong in the long run. Can the experienced people here tell me what I should choose? I am fine with either style of approach to HTML(template vs declarative) and I just want a batteries included framework, which I can…

What kind of "batteries" are you looking to be included? Knockoutjs doesn't automate saving to the server (though it can do everything up to the Ajax call), and IMO it has a pretty intuitive model and near-perfect docs. As a recent convert, I would recommend that you consider it. Unless you've already rejected it for your own reasons, in which case I'm curious what those are. PS: the tutorial does have a little opaqu…

Knockout only really works if you totally intermix your model code with it. You have to annotate every darn thing until it's impossible to see what the underlying logic was.

Angular's docs suck, but my own code is safely isolated and can be easily developed and tested in isolation.

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#25

Post by ams6110 »

mgkimsal wrote: post #13
jacques_chester wrote: post #5

Angular is god's gift to programming bloggers. The documentation is so famously patchy, contradictory and impenetrable that an entire cottage industry of talmudic literature has sprung up around it overnight. I've spent the last two weeks slicing and dicing the developer guide and all the directly related API documentation -- this one-page demo is better than the entire Angular tutorial. It also covers the most impor…

"The docs by themselves simply will not teach you how Angular works." Well said, and I agree, but I wonder why this is? There's some cred to be gained by making and using something so impenetrable that only a select handful of people 'just know' how something works, and everyone aspires to be like them? I've found plenty of people/blogs/sites telling me I'm doing angular 'wrong' (and not just angular - other framewor…

What these "younger devs" don't realize is that in most cases they are simply reinventing stuff that has existed for years. Even today, the best JS MVC frameworks only just provide the capabilities to build UIs that (for example) were trivial in PowerBuilder 20 years ago.

The fact that it's considered "gee whiz" that you can enter a value into a form field and have that value automatically validated and bound to an attribute in a "model" shows how little we have really advanced.

Web UIs offer a lot in the way of visual styling and easy distribution... but the actual building of apps hasn't really advanced much.

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#26

Post by Foxandxss »

steveklabnik wrote: post #20
mgkimsal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The docs by themselves simply will not teach you how Angular works." Well said, and I agree, but I wonder why this is? There's some cred to be gained by making and using something so impenetrable that only a select handful of people 'just know' how something works, and everyone aspires to be like them? I've found plenty of people/blogs/sites telling me I'm doing angular 'wrong' (and not just angular - other framewor…

Writing documentation is really hard. It's also hard to get people to contribute to documentation. I had a conversation with someone recently that was frustrated about the Rails documentation: "Here's my blog post about how to do X. Apparently that's what Rails people do rather than write docs." When I asked why they didn't contribute to the docs rather than make Yet Another Blog Post that feeds into the exact proble…

I agree with you.

I don't feel I have the experience to write better angular docs. That could be a goal in a future for sure.

Even when I am going to write about things that could be used to improve the official docs, one of my main goals is to answer via blog the questions I see everyday: "Why this doesn't work?", "My directive is not doing what I need", "My service is not updating"...

I think that the documentation itself needs to be done from various angles, and this is one for me.

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#28

Post by mgkimsal »

jacques_chester wrote: post #15
mgkimsal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The docs by themselves simply will not teach you how Angular works." Well said, and I agree, but I wonder why this is? There's some cred to be gained by making and using something so impenetrable that only a select handful of people 'just know' how something works, and everyone aspires to be like them? I've found plenty of people/blogs/sites telling me I'm doing angular 'wrong' (and not just angular - other framewor…

They say that great athletes make bad coaches. Why? Because they can't explain what came instinctively. Similarly, the wrong person to write documentation is the creator of a system. He or she will not know what leaps of understanding are being made throughout the text. That's why big IT companies have historically hired technical writers, which is a profession in its own right. Those general observations aside, I be…

"But otherwise, in the case of the Angular docs, there is a simple lack of attention to detail. Poor fit and finish. It's pretty clear that a lot of the documentation is the first draft."

Spot on.

"In the comments you can always find someone complaining and someone else saying "fork it on github". If you actually go and look at github, there are hundreds of unanswered pull requests. So clearly that isn't working either."

Agreed.

I would disagree that the person/team writing something isn't fit to document it. Yes, sometimes they're not the best choice, but often they're the only person, and there's no 'choice' at all.

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#30

Post by jacques_chester »

ams6110 wrote: post #25
mgkimsal wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The docs by themselves simply will not teach you how Angular works." Well said, and I agree, but I wonder why this is? There's some cred to be gained by making and using something so impenetrable that only a select handful of people 'just know' how something works, and everyone aspires to be like them? I've found plenty of people/blogs/sites telling me I'm doing angular 'wrong' (and not just angular - other framewor…

What these "younger devs" don't realize is that in most cases they are simply reinventing stuff that has existed for years. Even today, the best JS MVC frameworks only just provide the capabilities to build UIs that (for example) were trivial in PowerBuilder 20 years ago. The fact that it's considered "gee whiz" that you can enter a value into a form field and have that value automatically validated and bound to an a…

I sometimes wonder what the world would look like if somehow it was all hypercards or DCOM or OpenDoc or NeWS or just about anything other than a simple document format painfully hammered into the shape of an applications platform.
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