undefined | Better HN

0 pointssingular12y ago0 comments

I'd be interested to read about your issues with it. It is definitely weird, but I don't think it's for its own sake, rather it's adding a new layer of abstraction which will always come off as a bit strange until you get used to it, e.g. lisp.

I've not had awful problems debugging it, certainly no more than any other js library spitting out "cannot read property 'foo' of null" all over the place with stack traces that give you no help, though I don't deny it can be a bitch.

I'm not sure I understand your point about polluting the HTML namespace - sure you can introduce new HTML tags which can conflict, but if you're careful it's not an issue (and you can choose what directives to make available in a given module.)

I think one key thing I'd say to newcomers to angular is that when it doesn't work it can be an absolute bitch to resolve problems, though you gradually adapt to its patterns over time and such pain reduces significantly.

Like I said in the grandmother* post I do think the positives outweigh the negatives. In fact, I think they MASSIVELY outweigh the negatives, easy 2-way data binding and the code/html reuse of directives alone are enough to make me love it, but hey I get where you're coming from on the painful aspects.

* A sad attempt at reducing sexism in tree analogies.

0 comments

5 comments · 2 top-level

alanh12y ago· 3 in thread

I do love having easy two-way data binding, too, certainly.

To clarify: When you use a directive with an "isolate scope", you have to pass it parameters in your template, which means using arbitrary "HTML attributes" in ways that do not, in fact, have anything to do with HTML attributes. E.g.:

<my-directive model="myModel.foo" compact="true"></my-directive>

Is it plausible that HTML eventually defines a meaning for `model` and/or `compact` attributes? Did you just write illegal HTML? Yes. Is there already a way to do this in HTML? Yes, the `data-*` attribute namespace is free to use.

The whole dirty-checking thing requires an insane amount of CPU work, sometimes. Once you’re doing 15 or 20 AJAX requests, your browser may use 100% CPU for minutes (and that’s on desktop)! Why? We aren’t exactly sure. But I have bumped into other people at local JS meetups who have experienced the same thing. (Their solution? Give up and use Backbone. Ours? Load fewer things. I think it may also be viable to do all your network requests out of the Angular context to avoid a full dirty-check cycle on each `readyStateChange` event, but that’s not entirely straightforward, either, since we used Angular services to create our models, which know how to load their own dependencies… ack… it’s a mess.)

evilduck12y ago

FYI, you can prefix all of Angular's HTML additions with data-ng-* attribute.

    <my-directive data-ng-model="myModel.foo" compact="true"></my-directive>

alanh12y ago

That’s true for `ng-model` but is it true for parameters passed in to directives?

2 more replies

sluukkonen12y ago

Angular supports data-attributes as well.

warfangle12y ago

Batarang[0] is chrome plugin that vastly helps with debugging angular. I also highly recommend approaching it from a TDD standpoint. The seed[1] project comes with a baked-in testrunner. This also helps you move away from direct dom manipulation unless absolutely necessary: treat it like the definition of an html DSL specific to your app.

0. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/angularjs-batarang...

1. https://github.com/angular/angular-seed

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse