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Ask HN: What is the best alternative to Angular JavaScript framework?

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Re: Ask HN: What is the best alternative to Angular JavaScript framework?

#21

Post by huskyr »

You're asking two different questions:

1) What is the best alternative to Angular?

2) What should developers invest their resources and time in?

For 1), like drinchev says, it heavily depends on your usecase. If you're making a 'regular' website i would opt for plain old backend HTML rendering combined with simple Javascript and maybe a bit of jQuery. But if you're making a 'webapp' that's very dynamic, a framework like Angular or React might be a better option.

Considering question 2): invest your time in learning Javascript, and whatever language you think might be useful. It's good to know as many frameworks as possible, but in the end language knowledge is far more useful than framework-specific knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best alternative to Angular JavaScript framework?

#22

Post by o_____________o »

swah wrote: post #18
o_____________o wrote: post #12

React, which is "just the V in MVC" Combine that with Reflux[1], which is a more opinionated framework around it. It's conceptually a little different than the Flux pattern that Facebook recommends, but the changes make sense after you have some insight into the Flux pitfalls. Stir in some react-router[2]. It's still not as full featured as Angular or Ember, so you'll need to adjust your expectations there. On that n…

Will all due respect, what are the odds that a single guy has "insights into Flux pitfalls" that the gigantic creator of React, that is deploying the tech for billions of people, has missed?

Do you think the universality of a framework grows in scale with the size of the organization that made it?

Facebook didn't sit down and try to engineer a globally appealing framework, they open sourced and documented part of one of their internal patterns.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best alternative to Angular JavaScript framework?

#23

Post by jasonm23 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #7

Note that the weird direction is not final yet - Angular 2.0 is still a ways off, you don't actually have to use AtScript to build your applications (ES6, ES6 + Traceur annotations, CoffeeScript, Dart, AtScript should all work), and the funky HTML attribute syntax is still under debate because most browsers don't actually support .setAttribute() with bracketed attribute names. Besides, 1.x works and will keep functio…

You just reminded me of the Python 2.x -> Python 3.x "migration"

Re: Ask HN: What is the best alternative to Angular JavaScript framework?

#24

Post by dodyg »

The alternative for Angular framework is not using a framework.

As long as you keep tying yourself to a framework, you will encounter the same situation as Angular 1.0.

Don't do it.

Just pick libraries that does one thing well and wire them together yourself.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best alternative to Angular JavaScript framework?

#25

Post by stackthatcode »

I really like KnockoutJS, having used it on multiple projects, both personal and professional. Many will say that it can't really be apples-to-apples compared with Angular since it's technically MVVM, it lacks many of Angular's features, like dependency injection etc. etc. And that's all true. But, the end result for me is that I'm able to rapidly build sophisticated client apps. I'd have to dig up the links, but there are some pretty complex front-end apps i.e. website builders and the like, that were developed using KnockoutJS.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best alternative to Angular JavaScript framework?

#26

Post by Cthulhu_ »

dodyg wrote: post #24

The alternative for Angular framework is not using a framework. As long as you keep tying yourself to a framework, you will encounter the same situation as Angular 1.0. Don't do it. Just pick libraries that does one thing well and wire them together yourself.

So you're suggesting to go back to the PHP era where everyone else was writing their own framework? Okay so yeah there's some good libraries out there that will make things easier, but you - and many others - are still telling people to basically write their own framework.

If that's not going to cause fragmentation and headaches for other developers that need to work on that project, I don't know what will.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best alternative to Angular JavaScript framework?

#27

Post by lupinglade »

"AngularJS 2.0 itself will be written with AtScript, but then transpiled to ES5. You can write your AngularJS 2.0 app with ES5, ES6, AtScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, etc. Angular 2.0 apps will run in today's browsers, and even better as ES6 features land"

Re: Ask HN: What is the best alternative to Angular JavaScript framework?

#28

Post by andyfleming »

dodyg wrote: post #24

The alternative for Angular framework is not using a framework. As long as you keep tying yourself to a framework, you will encounter the same situation as Angular 1.0. Don't do it. Just pick libraries that does one thing well and wire them together yourself.

Agreed. I imagine Angular 1.x will continue to have strong support for a while. The community and resources seem pretty extensive.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best alternative to Angular JavaScript framework?

#29

Post by Cthulhu_ »

jasonm23 wrote: post #23
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #7

Note that the weird direction is not final yet - Angular 2.0 is still a ways off, you don't actually have to use AtScript to build your applications (ES6, ES6 + Traceur annotations, CoffeeScript, Dart, AtScript should all work), and the funky HTML attribute syntax is still under debate because most browsers don't actually support .setAttribute() with bracketed attribute names. Besides, 1.x works and will keep functio…

You just reminded me of the Python 2.x -> Python 3.x "migration"

Yeah, there's a striking similarity between the two. Luckily though, Angular is just a framework, not a full programming language.

Re: Ask HN: What is the best alternative to Angular JavaScript framework?

#30

Post by lhorie »

Mithril might be worth looking into. It's similar to React in terms of providing a unidirectional data flow pattern for code organization, and it comes with a few other useful tools out of the box (e.g. routing, ajax, promises), despite being smaller in terms of byte count.

It's designed to leverage generic knowledge as much as possible, as opposed to introducing a large amount of framework-specific terminology that no one else uses and that may be out of flavour in 3 years.

I've heard people say they were able to get up and running in less than an hour, so even if you don't ultimately use it, I think it's worth investing some time into looking into it.

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