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2 years with Angular

fse.guru

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Re: 2 years with Angular

#151
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew someone who consulted a large bank not to use Angular for financial apps. They were insistent to use Angular until he finally showed them a fairly typical requirement of an app like that in angular: 5 tables with 100 rows and columns. It literally crawled when running on a Dell Workstation laptop. It is kind of nuts that angular is big.

My team is using Angular for an app that contains large tabular data all over the place. We ended up having to rewrite the table generation in jQuery and now we've got a POC in development using React. Most other places we've had to use shims like angular-once to make menus performant. At this point we're building work-arounds for most of the things that makes Angular special.

> has perf issues with angularjs

> writes a solution using jQuery

Angular tries to be clever and solve loads of problems, sure tables and table rendering sucks anyways, but a simple querySelector with jQuery is 98% slower than just using normal DOM methods.

If you're gonna write your own bits of code to improve the caveats of any framework, especially in the financial industry, you go full hog and you write it properly.

Fixing an angular problem with a jQuery solution will get you marginal gains. Fixing an angular problem with a DOM solution will get you the best results and it isn't even that hard.

Re: 2 years with Angular

#152

I find the rise of Angular kind of baffling. Angular's scope system is exactly analogous to the scope system of a programming language. This is a solved problem! When you make a scope system, make it lexical, and require explicit declaration before use. If you're not making those choices, then at least acknowledge that these are the standard answers, with very clear advantages over other scoping systems, and explain…

I knew someone who consulted a large bank not to use Angular for financial apps. They were insistent to use Angular until he finally showed them a fairly typical requirement of an app like that in angular: 5 tables with 100 rows and columns. It literally crawled when running on a Dell Workstation laptop. It is kind of nuts that angular is big.

I don't understand this. Were they using angular grid? Because I work on an app that has tables with ng-repeat attributes and it is insanely fast. It loads hundreds or thousands of rows into about 200 columns that are separated by tabs. The client side filter searches are instant.

Re: 2 years with Angular

#153

I find the rise of Angular kind of baffling. Angular's scope system is exactly analogous to the scope system of a programming language. This is a solved problem! When you make a scope system, make it lexical, and require explicit declaration before use. If you're not making those choices, then at least acknowledge that these are the standard answers, with very clear advantages over other scoping systems, and explain…

Judging from your username, I feel like I've been seeing you on various web forums for ages. At any rate, yes, yes and yes. It doesn't take a CS wizard to see such basic faults from the get go. Still I had to try angular for a day to really see how terrible it was in practice.

There is the adage that "good enough" is good enough, but there should be another one that starting really bad stays bad no matter how many fixes get applied year after year (then the magical 2.0 happens)

Look at good enough languages like Perl and Python, they have their faults, Python 3 solves a lot of them, but 2.7 stays in production because it really is good enough. People don't go bailing on it for some other option because their codebases got unmaintainable, performance problems got O(n^2) or worse, they just go bail because maybe they want to try the compiled ease of Go or maybe touch Julia over numpy here or there.

Bad is bad, and people need to use just a bit of their algorithms class to figure it out. Shame that a ton of people asking similar questions about "how do I _______" results in a higher PageRank, while time tested easy to use options just hide in the shadows of good documentation and infrequent code updates.

Re: 2 years with Angular

#154
Bizarrely enough, I've built about 4 web apps ( using Angular over the past 2 years also. However, I've found that scalability (mainly due to it's reusability) is one of the strongest points. I've worked with enormous applications built entirely with jQuery.

I love angular, but perhaps thats because I'd only worked with jQuery before.

Re: 2 years with Angular

#155

I find the rise of Angular kind of baffling. Angular's scope system is exactly analogous to the scope system of a programming language. This is a solved problem! When you make a scope system, make it lexical, and require explicit declaration before use. If you're not making those choices, then at least acknowledge that these are the standard answers, with very clear advantages over other scoping systems, and explain…

I knew someone who consulted a large bank not to use Angular for financial apps. They were insistent to use Angular until he finally showed them a fairly typical requirement of an app like that in angular: 5 tables with 100 rows and columns. It literally crawled when running on a Dell Workstation laptop. It is kind of nuts that angular is big.

[deleted]

Re: 2 years with Angular

#156

I'm late to the party, but I want to share an insight I've had regarding game development and UI applications. It baffled me for a long time why building UIs were such a pain, and doubly so in a web app. Why could I, and others, create such seemingly advanced graphics and interactions in a video game, but try to make a UI and you're stuck with thousands of difficult to discover bugs. After I started using react, I re…

Lucky you, in the old days we couldn't always re-render whole scene :(

Re: 2 years with Angular

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is the disclaimer about data binding limitations? Tabular views with hundreds or even thousands of rows aren't inherently uncommon or non-performant. It's easy to sit here and say "wrong tool", but this is a pretty significant weakness IMO.

There probably should be a disclaimer in the official docs somewhere, but if you Google for ngRepeat performance there are tons of discussions on this. It's also a perennial favorite topic for angular tech talks. There is also a lot of information on how to improve the performance if for some reason you really want to do this. That said, even if the performance were great right out of the box without using one-time b…

"Trying to learn the framework by reading blog posts isn't going to work."

"...but if you Google for ngRepeat performance there are tons of discussions on this."

Re: 2 years with Angular

#158
Sorry, did I miss the part where the author explained the "right (tm)" way to do things these days?

Seriously though, I've used Angular just as long as the author and for the most part I wholeheartedly agree with the complaints (and I have complained myself for some time). However, what is the "better" way? People keep throwing out things like React, but React solves much less for app developers. Also, that answer doesn't help the countless people who began app development more than a year or so before React was released.

The Javascript ecosystem is evolving constantly and yet in some ways not much at all. Throughout that time, I've found that just about everyone can find excellent reasons not to use the various frameworks and libraries but few offer concrete recommendations in exchange for these criticisms. It's disappointing.

At this point in our own project, like many others I assume, we are reconsidering Angular. Not simple because we don't like it, but because clearly the Angular team doesn't either. Angular 2.0, like Sproutcore 2.0 before it, appears to be a complete rewrite. (Rightfully so.) As a result, we plan to examine our other options in detail while our work is still mostly in the prototype territory.

Right now however, I don't think I've seen anything yet, that makes sense for most people who've started out with Angular to do that re-write. I'm hoping as I spend more time examining this I'll find I'm wrong.

I've had many people ask me what framework they should use for new projects and every time I've said, it probably doesn't matter use right now, but be prepared to fully rewrite things in a year or so. The JS ecosystem is in so much flux right now that you can't count on any of these choices being the right one in couple of years. I've accepted that reality for now.

People hate this answer. They tell me that no PM/Exec is going to want to hear that. Fine, don't tell them. The silver lining is that whatever does comes to save us will hopefully be so much more productive than what you were doing before you won't care about rewriting it, you'll do it because it actually makes sense.

Let's all hope that's true.

Re: 2 years with Angular

#159

I'm late to the party, but I want to share an insight I've had regarding game development and UI applications. It baffled me for a long time why building UIs were such a pain, and doubly so in a web app. Why could I, and others, create such seemingly advanced graphics and interactions in a video game, but try to make a UI and you're stuck with thousands of difficult to discover bugs. After I started using react, I re…

Also you can use a different exotic approach in every game - it's completely open!

In the modern closed web you unfortunately have to deal with legacy tech like HTML, JS, CSS which will never ever go away "because compatibility".

Re: 2 years with Angular

#160
post #25

I recently wrote about my experience with Angular in a different forum. Sharing it here: I worked on Angular last year building an app with a few complex views. The initial days were full of glory. Data-binding was new to me, which produced much goodwill towards the framework. Things started falling apart as I had to inevitably understand the framework in a little more depth. They practically wrote a programming lang…

Somewhat, but not completely unrelated to your story... > Google recently released a new version of their developer console ( https://console.developers.google.com ) which is built on Angular. Which actually works worse than the previous version. The layout is non-responsive and creates massive amounts of scrollbars on "portrait"-monitors, while 90% of the screen is effectively white-space. Completely wasted. Complet…

IE11's developer console UI is also apparently written in HTML/JS rather than a native UI. It's not better.
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