Introducing Aurelia

I guess it isn't too early when you consider who is actually behind Aurelia: Rob Eisenberg. If you have used Durandal before, then you will know what I am talking about. I have no doubt in my mind that Aurelia is going to shake things up. Just having a play with it earlier gave me a sense of excitement that I remember getting when I first used Angular all those years ago.

I get the impression we're dealing with a framework that is based in part on Durandal, so it is not an entirely new framework in certain aspects (I could be wrong). And on the plus side, Rob has proven himself as an effective leader on projects like this and during his time on the Angular 2.0 team, he was doing some great work.

Is this backwards compatible? I thought Evergreen browsers meant IE10+

A little more detail please?

Unreliable

What version of phantom are you referring to? Do you have any specific examples?

Barely maintained

They do have a lot of tickets open, but in uses of phantom (wrapped by nightmarejs), I have not run into many issues that even required filing tickets/requiring maintenance. 90% of the use case of something like phantom is rolling around the page and clicking on stuff/filling out fields/evaluating some javascript, and it does that fantastically most of the time. Maybe I haven't done enough ambitious things with phantom.

Brutally slow

Compared to what? Selenium? I hope you're not comparing to the testing included with angular, because those are two different kinds of tests. Also, in the end, I think the most important kind of test is the kind of test you write with something like phantom/selenium because it requires that the system (at a macro level) does what it's supposed to do. If you make a todo app, you can have all your unit tests pass and the app still be broken. You definitely can't have your integration/end-to-end test pass if the app doesn't actually work (though the functions may be terrible, buggy, etc.

Personally (I have no data to back this), but I doubt Angular has seen remarkable adoption because of easy testing.

[EDIT] - I just noticed that you ignored the mention of Jasmine -- Maybe Angular shouldn't require it's own testing strategy at all, that seems like a pretty good indicator of a monolith (which Angular is, so I guess that's not really an interesting point).

From the homepage:

By combining ES6 modules with a simple, yet powerful Dependency Injection Container, we make it easy for you to create highly cohesive, yet minimally coupled code, making unit testing a snap.

Yeah. I just got done doing a very large SPA using Knockout, and I'm now starting a little side project with React/Flux.

Pain points I found with the Knockout based app: Performance, stupidly messy data flows, hard to test, lack of isomorphism. My choice of React/Flux for my next project was based on that: React makes a big deal about performance (virtual DOM), sensible data flow (flux architecture, one-way data flows, events, etc.), testability, and isomorphism.

I clicked on OPs link with some apprehension; is the stack I just chose already outdated? Not according to the blog post. They still need a "bunch of work" on performance and testing (which implies that it's not there yet, and also raises questions about priorities; testing seems like it should be more than an afterthought). There's no mention of isomorphism. And while technical details are sparse, it looks like there's no virtual DOM; no strongly enforced event model (like React has with Flux). Maybe it's there, but...

...given the amount of experience the author has writing JS frameworks, I'd have expected a lot more details on how this framework solves problems the programmer might have with other frameworks. I mean, the very first bullet is "Aurelia is written with vanilla ES6 and ES7 but transpiled and polyfilled to work on today’s Evergreen browsers. It may just be the most forward-thinking framework you've ever seen", but speaking just for myself, I've never ever thought to myself "man, this framework is awesome, but if only it had been written in ES7 and transpiled to work in my current browser!" I'm struggling to imagine why anyone would think that.

Now, maybe it's just a bad blog post. I'll do some more digging. But the message I'm getting so far is "this framework was created to solve the kind of issues framework authors care about, not the issues developers using the framework care about". If true, it's not a good message.

In short: Get off my lawn. :(