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Things that suck in AngularJS

lhorie.blogspot.ca

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Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#31

Post by alxndr »

joshuacc wrote: post #7
gkoberger wrote: post #4

Documentation is by far the worst part of Angular. I spent 90% of my time Googling and 10% writing code. (Hey, maybe that's Google's plan -- ramp up traffic to search. Synergy!) AngularUI is confusing, mostly undocumented and often behind Angular. Splitting ngRoute/ngAnimate into their own files is an odd choice, although I assume the former is so they can replace it with the superior ui-router. Which also is weird.…

I agree that the documentation could be better. When I first started working with Angular I had similar issues. However, after spending a decent amount of time working with the framework, I find the documentation fairly clear. The problem is really the lack of concrete examples of how things fit together. However, Angular UI is a totally separate set of projects that is not run by the Angular team at all. Not sure wh…

With this many people saying the documentation could be improved, is there a reason holding everyone back from contributing or improving it?

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#32

Post by davexunit »

The Angular docs are a ghetto. They really need to get rid of the Disqus comments section. Also, I don't think it really helps that their docs are an Angular application. I would really prefer a static html manual and an offline version in pdf or info format.

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#33

Post by flylib »

camus2 wrote: post #23
general_failure wrote: post #14

If you think angular docs are bad , you should try ember. Ember is so frustrating. All answers on SO are out of date or wrong.

Ember creators cleary did not know where they were heading when they began writing it. AngularJS was influenced by Flex and Spry( the creator worked at Adobe ) from the start, and still is.

Ember was heavily influenced by Sproutcore

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#34

Post by Bahamut »

Nitramp wrote: post #12

I agree with most of the things mentioned in the article, but here are a couple of nits, just in case you have that exact problem and look for the fix: $timeout having no $cancelTimeout: that's just called $timeout.cancel(), taking the promise you got out of the initial $timeout call. $.when is called $q in AngularJS, support for promises actually runs deep in the framework. Regarding the difficulty of instantiating…

Yeah, he had a few minor incorrect details - the $q one was a big omission, it sounds like he never explored using $q.all, much less $q at all.

I think Angular's complexity can be daunting without someone who can help set you back on the right path when you're stumped. We (the regular denizens on IRC) do a pretty good job in #angularjs on Freenode helping people out when we can, but it's obviously whenever people can spare the time to answer questions. I am constantly helping people at work grasp how to think the Angular way, and it has resulted in my team being incredibly productive due to Angular's excellent upsides.

Regardless though, I think it's good that this article was written, even if a little prematurely. People should know both the upsides and downsides.

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#35

Post by cgag »

pron wrote: post #25
camus2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google has the chance to build the new framework that will run the web in 2-3 years. Much like Rails a few years ago. Angular is an amazing framework. It seems like they just don't care. People use to say that about ExtJS a few years ago , then BackboneJS, etc ... There will never be one framework to rule them all , like Rails never ruled server-side developpment, Rails influenced other frameworks. Likewise Angular…

ClojureScript uses Closure.

This seems like such a huge win, I'm it's not more common with other compile to js languages.

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#36

Post by rcconf »

I found Angular to be overly complex and couldn't imagine training a team to learn to use it in reasonable time. That's the scariest part of adopting Angular for me. How would other coworkers adapt to the API and how long would it take for them to use it?

The documentation was o.k at best, but I find that isn't the core issue. If you take a look at http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/concepts, it takes a very long time to completely understand what's happening under the covers.

I'm definitely looking for alternatives.

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#37

Post by antihero »

gkoberger wrote: post #4

Documentation is by far the worst part of Angular. I spent 90% of my time Googling and 10% writing code. (Hey, maybe that's Google's plan -- ramp up traffic to search. Synergy!) AngularUI is confusing, mostly undocumented and often behind Angular. Splitting ngRoute/ngAnimate into their own files is an odd choice, although I assume the former is so they can replace it with the superior ui-router. Which also is weird.…

I've actually found AngularUI's docs to be pretty okay.

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#38

Post by k3n »

alxndr wrote: post #31
joshuacc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the documentation could be better. When I first started working with Angular I had similar issues. However, after spending a decent amount of time working with the framework, I find the documentation fairly clear. The problem is really the lack of concrete examples of how things fit together. However, Angular UI is a totally separate set of projects that is not run by the Angular team at all. Not sure wh…

With this many people saying the documentation could be improved, is there a reason holding everyone back from contributing or improving it?

The irony is that not only is there a commenting system to complain about the docs, but that at the top of most of the pages is a prominent "Improve this doc" button, which when clicked, takes you directly to the file in Github. Some of the docs are .md (markdown) while the rest are the actual code files. I don't know how often they accept pull requests, much less for doc-only changes, but they have almost 150 PR's in queue.

And this is something I was unaware of until now, a "Contributor License Agreement"[1] is required for a pull-request to be accepted. Sheesh, that's kind of a PITA...

1. http://docs.angularjs.org/misc/contribute#CLA

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#39

Post by antihero »

adrianbg wrote: post #8

My biggest pet peeve is how it suppresses errors in inline expressions.

Fucking hell. I do like AngularJS, but everything to do with expressions pisses me off. Fairly incoherent documentation, combined with lack of errors or any sort of meaningful way to debug them.

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#40

Post by ne8il »

camus2 wrote: post #15
gkoberger wrote: post #4

Documentation is by far the worst part of Angular. I spent 90% of my time Googling and 10% writing code. (Hey, maybe that's Google's plan -- ramp up traffic to search. Synergy!) AngularUI is confusing, mostly undocumented and often behind Angular. Splitting ngRoute/ngAnimate into their own files is an odd choice, although I assume the former is so they can replace it with the superior ui-router. Which also is weird.…

> Google has the chance to build the new framework that will run the web in 2-3 years. Much like Rails a few years ago. Angular is an amazing framework. It seems like they just don't care. People use to say that about ExtJS a few years ago , then BackboneJS, etc ... There will never be one framework to rule them all , like Rails never ruled server-side developpment, Rails influenced other frameworks. Likewise Angular…

We've been running a client side SaaS on the Closure library/tools/compiler for a couple years now. You are right that it is not widely used outside Google (and certainly not as popular as Angular) but it is well-tested and there are some people out there using it for production work.
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