IMHO Angular is overly complicated once you try to dig in, for example to make your own HTML elements.
Building custom elements with Web Components/Polymer is the next step, along with promoting web components/polymer and working on getting compatibility in user's browsers.
People say its not ready for mainstream, which is true. _However_, if we all start taking Polymer/Web Components seriously, pretty quickly it _will_ be ready, i.e. it will work in new releases of Firefox, Chrome and probably Safari. And even IE 10 and 11. We just need people to start seriously trying to take advantage of it, patching things and pushing for compatibility/stability/adoption.
And someone might say something like "I think you are confused about what Angular and Web Components do.. blah Angular is going to take advantage of Web Components in the near future". So let me save you the lecture.
I have used Angular in 3 or 4 projects. I know what it does. I know it is going to use Web Components in the future.
But like I said, its too complicated. And most, if not all, of the things that you would do with Angular with/without using custom elements, you can take advantage of Polymer/Web Components features to do. And it will be much simpler to code and maintain, and not particular to any overall framework.
So as far as I'm concerned Angular is superfluous at this point, and a liability, if I am not constrained by immediately shitty browser realities.
If there is something that Angular does that can't be implemented with Web Components/Polymer, please let me know.
Not soon though, that is up to browser makers.
Angular is close enough tot he general idea though, that I think it's proving the approach is valid to an entire generation of devs. Devs who would never have known about web components if angular wasn't legitimising it.
[1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Gv-dvU-yy6WY7SiNJ9QR...
What is left for Angular to do? Really would like to know the answer to that.
If they are serious about helping move the web forward, they will just change the Angular logo to the Polymer logo and start pushing to make that work. And stop saying things like browsers aren't ready.
Polymer works in new versions of Firefox, Chrome and IE. We don't need a new version of Angular.
If someone thinks we need to keep using Angular, give me a reason. That presentation on Google Docs that is linked in the parent just shows reasons for Angular to go away.
> i was wrong to be afraid of angular.js
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7384937
> Why I was Wrong to be afraid of Angular.js
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7394959
> Complexity Creeps: Why I'm Concerned for the Future of Angular
> Simple and easy, a vocabulary for describing software complexity
http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/simple-and-easy-vocabulary-to-de...
> How complexity affects your software
Let's see what the spectrum of PHP solutions is. It goes from:
- WordPress: very simple, you don't need to be a coder, not that powerful.
And goes until:
- PHP + libraries: complicated, you need to be a coder, extremely powerful.
And here's Drupal:
- Drupal: a lot more more complicated than WordPress, not that much less complicated than plain PHP, yet much less powerful than plain PHP.
In a nutshell, Drupal and apps like it want to be everything to everyone, and that's how bad apps happen.
WordPress may suck, but it has focus, and people with simple needs like the proposition.
Wordpress maintainers just dont bother...because obsessed with backward compat.
Drupal is in my opinion (oddly) easier to maintain for non coders,CCK an Views, no need for any PHP skill to create new content types or write queries in Drupal.
With Wordpress,you need to code if you want to extend anything.
My problem with both is that the plugins are written in PHP.A good CMS would have at least one plugin layer which would rely on manifests(xml,json...) rather than code(just like angular),or at least have a sandbox system with permissions,some kind of inverted oauth system (eg:"this plugin wants to be able to write to your db,write to your file system,access this or that resource...")
To say it's less powerful than "plain PHP" is just wrong, since via custom modules, which you'll be writing at least a half dozen of for a real non-trivial (e.g. the kind of thing you wouldn't just do in WP, just you can essentially just sprinkle in 100% custom "plain PHP" whereever you need it, while still being able to leverage things Drupal does right, like form handling and batch operations.
4.7 and 5.x (the first versions I used) didn't have many nice themes or a particularly friendly interface for content creators, which Wordpress had and won. But the Drupal community weren't much into making simple sites (though they could be made).
Drupal has always struck me as a CMS for non-coders to create something quite complex, and when scaling something for a coder to pick up and adapt as they need, with a lot of stuff built-in. And it has definitely won on that front, with perhaps the most comparable system being Django, but even then Drupal is more Swiss Army Knife like: It can't open a tin of beans perfectly, but it can do it quickly, and a few hours in the tool-shop improve it a lot. Likewise it can cut down a tree (if painfully), cut your fabric and has a neat nose-pick built-in.
Numerous media, government and commerce sites use it. It is quite adaptable, gets the 90% done quickly (yes, the learning curve is greater than Wordpress, but a lot more is happening), and allows anyone with some PHP and CSS expertise get the remaining 10% done reasonably well.
my recommendation was that they remove it from core, and have it be opt-in through the use of ngmin.
they are actually removing it completely from angular 2.0, so it's a moot point really.
http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/complexity-creeps-concerned-for-...
I also stated that I was fine with the dirty checking, because it worked better than it had any real right to. And best of all, it's only 'for now'
I too felt the exact same way when looking at AngularJS. It seemed as though I could spend a year learning/perfecting my skills with it... only to be let down in the end.
i've seen how stuff changes over time, it makes me aware of this stuff.
Drupal wasn't always that complex either. I think i'm probably culpable. I identified the point where I complected Drupal and set it on this direction, but that's another article for another time.
I think Drupal is a relic of the past when monolithic frameworks rather than the microframeworks ruled the day, I agree the same thing is happening in javascript world. The smaller/component/message based libraries win out after people know how to do things. In the beginning monolithic helps people make the jump, but quickly become too all encompassing to the point it hides what you need to know (asp.net's famous fail).
Who knows, drupal might have started off clean but when you are an overarching monolithic framework that becomes the go to for marketing/bizdev technology decisions then it bloats to EOL. You won't find a happy developer in Drupal-land but you'll find lots of marketing/bizdev peeps that think they are working out the need for a developer by using the standard bloated CMS of the day. Angular is still on the developer front, but if it gets big enough and it is monolithic then it is a problem.
Drupal could be worse though, it could be Joomla, both flawed monolithic platforms from the PHPNuke evolution tree. That fad ended in 2007.
I would really like to see that article. Because, I too have been involved in such things, several times, but have not managed to identify exactly where we went wrong (or even convince others that we were going wrong :) ). I think figuring out how to avoid that kind of complexity is one of they key challenges of certain kinds of software these days.
(For instance, some people think Rails has already jumped that shark, some people don't, but I'm not sure even the people who think it has become complectified all agree on when it happened and how it could have been avoided. When I see people starting something new that's supposed to be "like Rails, but without all that needless complexity", I just think, sure, Rails started out simpler than today's Rails too, and you'll end up in the same place (or worse) unless you can come up with an understanding of what went wrong other than "Those other people made bad decisions I would never have made because I'm a better coder", nope, that's not what happened.).
