I'm going all in on Angular, even building a big open source project around it ( http://ionicframework.com/ ). What really drew me in was hearing from developers that were using it at big, slow companies for entire teams building production apps. Officially adopting a technology like that is pretty rare, and I guessed Angular had started to achieve a level of adoption that would make it the most worthwhile to invest…
Poll: Which JavaScript framework do you use (and why)?
41–50 of 78 posts
Re: Poll: Which JavaScript framework do you use (and why)?
#42Re: Poll: Which JavaScript framework do you use (and why)?
#43I have a single app model which uses a bunch of reactive signals and other registry data.
The great thing about browserify if it give you commonjs for the client side. commonjs takes care of the structure & naming of your domain logic. It also allows you to create fine-grained modules, which is wonderful for reuse & maintainability.
I wish there was a standalone Handlebars module which allows updates to the data, like what is done in Ember. I'm willing to use another template framework, which can be mimized, that supports data binding. React seems interesting.
I test with jasmine & jsdom. I tried phantom, but it's nice to be able to easily create test doubles as needed. I tend to perform black box (or functional) testing when possible, eschewing unit tests. I use jasmine-flow to test user flows.
Re: Poll: Which JavaScript framework do you use (and why)?
#44Re: Poll: Which JavaScript framework do you use (and why)?
#45I'm going all in on Angular, even building a big open source project around it ( http://ionicframework.com/ ). What really drew me in was hearing from developers that were using it at big, slow companies for entire teams building production apps. Officially adopting a technology like that is pretty rare, and I guessed Angular had started to achieve a level of adoption that would make it the most worthwhile to invest…
Ionic is pretty darn cool! We are building our customer facing app around it and it has made developing apps for smartphones a breeze. The funny thing is, we use the MEAN stack for the server side component so essentially, our entire dev stack is HTML5, CSS and Javascript :D
Re: Poll: Which JavaScript framework do you use (and why)?
#46Re: Poll: Which JavaScript framework do you use (and why)?
#47Re: Poll: Which JavaScript framework do you use (and why)?
#48Angular is great at first. You can get the first 80% of your application done in no time. The rough edges are intense though, and if you find yourself using the $compile and $parse services you're definitely writing code someone else is going to curse you for down the road.
Also, I do not understand why so many people think Angular is "testable." The end to end testing is weird and would be better accomplished with Selenium.
The unit testing story is even worse. inject() and module() helper functions are a necessity, and that fact alone should cause everyone pause. How come the basic injector is so difficult to load things into? Creating controllers in unit tests is awkward. Dealing with scope.$apply and promises is also painful.
Large code bases get painful quickly. There's (at least last time I looked) no dynamic script loading solution. You can use require, but coupling that with the dependency injector gets awkward. Further, directives sound great at first, but once big teams start pumping out directives, it gets difficult to reason about your html and figure out what's going on.
Form validation is really strange and the business requirements on every project I've worked have never been met by it.
Also, Angular seems to suffer more from client side rendering jitter than many of the SPA frameworks I've seen. Backbone does too, for sure, but it's easier to hook up something like FastDOM to Backbone.
Which leads me to Backbone - it's more of a library than a framework. It provides nice code structure and organization and otherwise stays out of your way. For small apps that may not be desirable, but for large apps it can absolutely be a blessing. Sure, you have to do more, it may even take more discipline, and it might even be more lines of code, but for big teams it really does seem like a better fit.
Finally, my contention is that VERY FEW APPLICATIONS SHOULD BE WRITTEN AS "SINGLE PAGE APPLICATIONS". Using something like Pjax + Backbone/React for light interactivity seems to be a sweet spot for many of the applications I've worked on. So many screens are read only, and performance will be markedly better rendering server side and injecting HTML directly in to the DOM.
Re: Poll: Which JavaScript framework do you use (and why)?
#49Well, I was going to say something good about it, but nothing comes to mind. To be fair, we've built some pretty complex applications on it, so clearly it can be made to work. It just doesn't feel natural, and you have to work around a lot of issues.
For some of the mobile development, we evaluated Angular, Knockout, and even briefly Meteor, but there was a desire for pre-canned view components available in the framework instead of writing HTML snippets/templates. It's too bad, because I really liked Angular and Ember (I didn't personally look at Meteor). I'm hoping to be able to use one of these on future projects.