<story><title>The problem with Angular</title><url>http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/01/the_problem_wit.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasonwocky</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t really follow many of the author&amp;#x27;s objections. I think he or she left out a lot of reasoning.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;This code reminds me of a simple server-side scripting language such as JSP or ASP that’s used to fill HTML templates with database content. These languages have their place in the web development stack — but on the server, not in the browser.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Says who? What&amp;#x27;s the rationale for where a language belongs?&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Although templating is the correct solution, doing it in the browser is fundamentally wrong. The cost of application maintenance should not be offloaded onto all their users’s browsers (we’re talking millions of hits per month here) — especially not the mobile ones. This job belongs on the server.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Again, based on what?&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;My point is that I expected far more front-enders to embrace Angular. I have the feeling their number is surprisingly low — see also the problems my clients had with finding good front-end Angular consultants. &amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;More stuff based on feeling rather than empirical evidence. And clients have trouble finding good front-end developers these days no matter what the technology is.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;A more important reason may be pushback from the JavaScript community. Angular has evoked some serious criticism.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Find me a framework that &lt;i&gt;hasn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; evoked serious criticism from some corner of the Internet.&lt;p&gt;Look, I&amp;#x27;m no fan of Angular. In fact I&amp;#x27;ve never written a thing in it. It doesn&amp;#x27;t really fit my style of front-end development (and I&amp;#x27;m a Java programmer!). I&amp;#x27;m more of a libraries-over-frameworks guy. But this article is not very well-reasoned.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lhorie</author><text>Just thought I&amp;#x27;d add a bit of meta context: PPK (the author of the article) is perhaps the first person in the js community to catalogue detailed per-feature cross-browser compatibility tables. You could say he&amp;#x27;s one of the old timers.&lt;p&gt;PPK has a very strong background in cross browser testing and high level technology evaluation for non-techie audiences, but (from my impression of reading this article, at least), it doesn&amp;#x27;t seem like he has much experience w&amp;#x2F; Angular per se and sounds like he is writing his opinions more based on blogosphere echo than personal time spent with the framework (clue: lack of Angular-specific terminology criticism)&lt;p&gt;Some of the criticism is valid, I think: hiring &amp;quot;Angular&amp;quot; devs is hard, partly because of the over-engineered-Java-like feel. I&amp;#x27;ve seen a few times overconfident frontenders think they could pick up Angular through Google-Fu just as they picked up jQuery, and then hitting a brick wall face first, with a looming deadline to add insult to the injury. The reality is that a lot of people (especially frontend people) don&amp;#x27;t have the CS foundation to understand why and when the design patterns prevalent in Angular&amp;#x2F;Java are useful (or even what patterns exist to begin with).&lt;p&gt;@jasonwocky The snippets you highlighted do seem a bit like a &amp;quot;get-off-my-lawn&amp;quot; reaction from the author. SPA architectures certainly have their places, and it does feel like the author hasn&amp;#x27;t had experience w&amp;#x2F; building heavily dynamic UI apps.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;&amp;gt; Find me a framework that hasn&amp;#x27;t evoked serious criticism from some corner of the Internet.&lt;p&gt;I think the point is that Angular criticism is much more prominent (and sometimes vitriolic) than other frameworks.</text></comment>
<story><title>The problem with Angular</title><url>http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2015/01/the_problem_wit.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>jasonwocky</author><text>I don&amp;#x27;t really follow many of the author&amp;#x27;s objections. I think he or she left out a lot of reasoning.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;This code reminds me of a simple server-side scripting language such as JSP or ASP that’s used to fill HTML templates with database content. These languages have their place in the web development stack — but on the server, not in the browser.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Says who? What&amp;#x27;s the rationale for where a language belongs?&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Although templating is the correct solution, doing it in the browser is fundamentally wrong. The cost of application maintenance should not be offloaded onto all their users’s browsers (we’re talking millions of hits per month here) — especially not the mobile ones. This job belongs on the server.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Again, based on what?&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;My point is that I expected far more front-enders to embrace Angular. I have the feeling their number is surprisingly low — see also the problems my clients had with finding good front-end Angular consultants. &amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;More stuff based on feeling rather than empirical evidence. And clients have trouble finding good front-end developers these days no matter what the technology is.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;A more important reason may be pushback from the JavaScript community. Angular has evoked some serious criticism.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Find me a framework that &lt;i&gt;hasn&amp;#x27;t&lt;/i&gt; evoked serious criticism from some corner of the Internet.&lt;p&gt;Look, I&amp;#x27;m no fan of Angular. In fact I&amp;#x27;ve never written a thing in it. It doesn&amp;#x27;t really fit my style of front-end development (and I&amp;#x27;m a Java programmer!). I&amp;#x27;m more of a libraries-over-frameworks guy. But this article is not very well-reasoned.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>robotkilla</author><text>Currently wrapping up my first commercial AngularJS project - I was outsourced by a client.&lt;p&gt;Prior to this contract I had no experience with it, now I&amp;#x27;ve been using it nearly every day for the past month and a half, have run through the tutorials and implemented it on a side project of mine.&lt;p&gt;All that said, I will be stripping Angular out of my side project. It is something I am glad I learned for clients that demand it, but I wouldn&amp;#x27;t recommend it.&lt;p&gt;IMO Backbone with underscore templates are much cleaner and seem to perform much faster for my needs (no benchmarks performed on my end, but as a user my site certainly felt snappier prior to implementing Angular).</text></comment>