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Why does Angular.js rock?

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Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#81

Post by at-fates-hands »

oinksoft wrote: post #40
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 documentation is not impenetrable, it is just that AngularJS is a library that takes a while to get up to speed on. What is lacking right now is writing on best practices and application design. The O'Reilly book offers some of this, but generally it's just a warm-up with a couple case studies at the end. http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/concepts is a model of good documentation, and http://docs.angularjs.org/guid…

>>This is why newcomers find the learning curve steep: It is a new way to write applications.

As someone who's run the gamut of "trendy" JS frameworks, I picked up Angular much faster than Backbone, Ember and Knockout combined. Maybe it's the MVC thing, I don't know, but something just clicked with me with Angular. After watching a few tutorials, I able to build something from scratch without much effort.

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#82

Post by at-fates-hands »

The issue I've consistently had with a lot of the "frameworks" coming out recently, is the lack of subject matter experts. It's like someone throws this stuff together, makes an attempt to sketch out some documentation and then just lets the developers have at it. Most of the developers who make videos or tutorials simply do a few basic ones, and leave the rest up to the community to figure out after that.

It would be nice if there was a team of developers who actually incubated this stuff so they could write some decent documentation, along with a gamut of examples from simple to highly complex so these frameworks didn't always looked like a half baked rush job on getting it out.

I know our industry moves fast, but I think we'd be better served with a complete set of documentation, with people who've been using these for some time and who can lay out a solid road map for developers interested in utilizing these frameworks.

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#83

Post by mickeyp »

dirtyaura wrote: post #77
ams6110 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wouldn't say that Angular is reinventing the wheel. Elegant and efficient two-way data binding is a non-trivial problem, and I haven't seen it implemented well (or at all!) in any UI framework that I have worked with in the last 15 years.

Delphi had amazing data binding. You literally dropped two non-visual components on your form; plonked down data-aware components; and then pointed it at any number of databases via ADO, DAO, ODBC or BDE and you were flying.

Unrivalled flexibility and power and you could do knock together a CRUD app in a couple of hours.

Add to that the incredible flexibility afforded by 3rd party components like DevExpress and you had grids and other tabular components that even today any amount of HTML5, JS and CSS and backend programming could only dream of achieving.

And we did this in the 90s.

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#84

Post by stock_toaster »

jacques_chester wrote: post #32
api wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They say that great athletes make bad coaches. Why? Because they can't explain what came instinctively." Thank you for finally explaining to me why mathematicians are such famously bad teachers of math. They just start scribbling symbols without explaining what they mean because of course you know what they mean...

I first heard it from one of the world's most experienced weightlifting coaches, Lyn Jones. It explained a lot to me too. The corollary is that people who love something, but can't do it easily, tend to be good coaches. Because they've had to really make an effort and have diligently sought out ways to improve themselves. Put another way: "those who can't do, teach" isn't an insult to teachers. It's praise .

  > Put another way: "those who can't do, teach" isn't an insult to teachers. It's praise.
Maybe that old saying should be rephrased to "those who can't instinctively do, teach".

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#85

Post by pixelcort »

sanderjd wrote: post #44
steveklabnik wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 realized something recently about docs-vs-blogs. An important difference between the two is that official documentation of a project is the place to say "this is how it is done", whereas blogs are a place to say "this is how I do it". If there isn't a consensus on how something should be done, but you think the way you do it is nice, it definitely makes sense to write about that in a blog post, but it only possibly…

An official blog can be, "This is how it is done, as of the time of posting."

However, then you end up with blog posts like, "here what's new in 3.5", without any documentation for users who never used 3.4 (or 3.3, 3.2...)

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#86

Post by jfb »

jacques_chester wrote: post #30
ams6110 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's fun to run the counterfactuals, but ultimately, we go to war with the lousy technology stack we have, not the mediocre one we want. I'm just overjoyed that, thanks to Android and iOS, people are writing native applications again.

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#87

Post by occam65 »

Once, just once - I want to read an article like this and in the conclusion read "It doesn't rock. This framework just really sucks."

Anyway, I've been using Angular for a couple of weeks now, and happen to really enjoy it.

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#88

Post by warfangle »

mickeyp wrote: post #83
dirtyaura wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say that Angular is reinventing the wheel. Elegant and efficient two-way data binding is a non-trivial problem, and I haven't seen it implemented well (or at all!) in any UI framework that I have worked with in the last 15 years.

Delphi had amazing data binding. You literally dropped two non-visual components on your form; plonked down data-aware components; and then pointed it at any number of databases via ADO, DAO, ODBC or BDE and you were flying. Unrivalled flexibility and power and you could do knock together a CRUD app in a couple of hours. Add to that the incredible flexibility afforded by 3rd party components like DevExpress and you h…

How was it at near-platform-universality and secure HTTP transmission?

Re: Why does Angular.js rock?

#89

Post by puppetmaster3 »

Angular and possibly other MVC .js are a solution that is looking for a problem. There were benefits to Server Side MVC, but those benefits are gone, but people masturbate still and love it. Thats OK. Advice: Just stick w/ CSS frameworks and jQuery.
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