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Things that suck in AngularJS

lhorie.blogspot.ca

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Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#61

Post by scardine »

flylib wrote: post #9

Surprised the knock is bad documentation (The site is awful), but I have heard that Angular has a lot better documentation then Ember currently does

Ember is still changing a lot, and some of the later changes are cleared inspired by Angular.

Ember-data looks much better than anything in Angular. Ember has a bit too much "convention over configuration" to my taste but the project is evolving well; I would not say it is production-ready but is getting close, so keep it under the radar.

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#62

Post by SkyMarshal »

rcconf wrote: post #36

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…

Check out Facebook/Instagram's React: http://facebook.github.io/react/

Simpler, and fast. I haven't messed with Angular enough to give an honest comparison, but I'm a fan of React's general design - it maintains its own model of the DOM, and user interactions change that model, then it diffs the new DOM back to the browser DOM.

Fwiw this idea seems to slowly be catching on. There are at least two other frameworks that use a similar model - theGuardian.co.uk recently open-sourced their frontend JS framework Ractive, and the Lift web framework impllements a similar model on the server side (been around since 2007, just now the idea seems to be making its way to the frontend).

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#63

Post by ryankshaw »

jaequery wrote: post #45
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 don't think Google created Angular, but rather a Google employee. I'd imagine if Google fully backed Angular, the syntax/design would've been much cleaner. Angular with a fresh boot would be something I'd hope for, they just keep adding things on top of it to keep BC as much as possible which is why it feels so dirty at times. I too get (extremely) frustrated with Angular at times for all the points mentioned by OP…

I can totally relate to "they just keep adding things on top of it to keep BC as much as possible which is why it feels so dirty at times. I too get (extremely) frustrated with Angular at times "

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#64

Post by film42 »

cgag wrote: post #35
pron wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ClojureScript uses Closure.

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

It's not so common because:

- It requires a running JVM to compile it all down (not a bad thing).

- Can take upwards of a second to compile depending on code base size and compression setting (even if the JVM is warm).

- Kills all ability to debug. Looks like "a.call().call()" etc.

That said, ClojureScript has been fun to work with, but IMO, Google Closure as dependency thwarts a lot of people looking to try it out like they might try CoffeeScript or TypeScript.

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#65

Post by Oculus »

pygy_ wrote: post #60
jaequery wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Google created Angular, but rather a Google employee. I'd imagine if Google fully backed Angular, the syntax/design would've been much cleaner. Angular with a fresh boot would be something I'd hope for, they just keep adding things on top of it to keep BC as much as possible which is why it feels so dirty at times. I too get (extremely) frustrated with Angular at times for all the points mentioned by OP…

Angular used to be its own startup. The founders were acquhired by Google.

Where'd you get the wrong idea that it was a Startup?

AngualrJS was a side project of Misko, who was working at Google on the DoubleClick team, until he bet he could rewrite DoubleClick in 1 or 2 (can't remember) weeks using his framework and cut down on the LOC/code complexity. He eventually did and they decided to go full time on the framework. They discussed this at the start of their Google IO presetation.

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#66

Post by EGreg »

Those people here looking for a tiny, sane MVC framework with live bindings should try CanMVC. After doing a bunch of frameworks (JavascriptMVC, DoneMVC) I think that company produced a simple, well documented framework better than Backbone.

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#67

Post by pygy_ »

Oculus wrote: post #65
pygy_ wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Angular used to be its own startup. The founders were acquhired by Google.

Where'd you get the wrong idea that it was a Startup? AngualrJS was a side project of Misko, who was working at Google on the DoubleClick team, until he bet he could rewrite DoubleClick in 1 or 2 (can't remember) weeks using his framework and cut down on the LOC/code complexity. He eventually did and they decided to go full time on the framework. They discussed this at the start of their Google IO presetation.

[0] which leads to [1]

Notice the "Copyright 2009 - Angular / BRAT Tech. LLC" at the bottom of the page.

IIRC, They had a plan to provide a paid or freemium server-side counterpart. edit: freemium, see the first revision of getangular.com[2], there's a pricing tab which disappeared later on.

update 2: they were not acquired, they abandoned the startup because it did not get enough traction. The framework lived on, though.

Development history

AngularJS was originally developed in 2009 by Miško Hevery and Adam Abrons as the software behind an online JSON storage service, that would have been priced by the megabyte, for easy-to-make applications for the enterprise. This venture was located at the web domain "GetAngular.com", and had a few subscribers, before the two decided to abandon the business idea and release Angular as an open-source library.

Abrons left the project, but Hevery, who works at Google, continues to develop and maintain the library with fellow Google employees Igor Minár and Vojta Jína.[3]

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20100601201616/http://www.angular...

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20100413141437/http://getangular....

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20091002201638/http://www.getangu...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AngularJS#Development_history

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#68

Post by eof »

I've been doing (mostly backend) webwork for a living for about half a decade now; the last ~6 months I have been building an app that is using angular.

I agree the documentation sucks; but beyond that I actually don't have any complaints. I don't have anything to compare it to; but I have written some JS over the years and what angular is doing is blowing my mind.

Because it blows my mind I find it hard to bitch or find fault. I did have to spend several hours stepping through angular core code to figure out WTF was going on with $scope.$watch(); but again, I can't really say that $watch itself sucks; just that I had to read the code to actually understand how to use it.

If I had to pick something other than documentation to point at, I would say that silent shadowing of non-object primitives when "new" scopes are creates for things like ng-repeat and ng-if

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#69

Post by Bahamut »

dsjoerg wrote: post #41
alxndr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In my case it's because I don't understand it well enough to write doc. The people who _do_ understand it well have managed to do so despite the state of the documentation, so maybe they think the doc is sufficient? It's one of those nasty problems, like the influence of money on politics, or gerrymandering, where the people best able to fix it are the ones least likely to think it's a problem.

A lot of us have invested a lot of time learning Angular, pains and all :) . I've contributed to the docs, as well as source. I've also reported issues, big and small.

The current docs have come a long way from their previous state - I recommend people try taking a look at them now. The developer guide & API docs have gotten huge improvements within the past month! I think the only things that are really left is to recommend some best practices with examples and more examples in the API section.

Re: Things that suck in AngularJS

#70

Post by chii »

hswolff wrote: post #47
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…

I thought Gmail was a compiled to JavaScript from Java application?

gmail existed before GWT was created.

But i m pretty sure GWT was created as a result of the research/code written for closure (which, even tho it was opensourced after GWT, existed before GWT in some form or another).

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