[d2kx]

1) I'm still new to this, but why would someone not use Angular Universal/why is it not default? I have only read positives, but am sure there must be a reason.

2) Why do we need Angular Material 2, when Google's official Material Components Web project is meant to be used with all kinds of frameworks and even has framework integration examples with Angular2: https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w...

3) Should I follow Quickstart or CLI Quickstart in the docs to get started? I have heard that the CLI is recommended nowadays, but the Angular 4.0 release blog says the CLI isn't even stable.

[robwormald]

1) the core of Angular Universal "graduated" into @angular/platform-server with 4.0 - previously it was a more experimental project. We're officially supporting a "renderToString()" API that can be used however you like.

So really, it's brand new, and we're excited to see what the community does with it.

Philosophically, pre-rendering every SPA server side isn't a silver bullet. For a ton of cases it makes a lot of sense, but we want to avoid the impression that we're positioning SSR as a replacement for making your app fast.

2) The expectation of the Material Components Web project is that everything be "wrapped" for the specific framework. Angular Material is native Angular, and we have a team dedicated to that. Polymer has a material suite as well, and most of those components can work in Angular apps too. Components for everyone!

2a) you're asking a Googler that question. We have like, 11 messaging apps. I don't know what to tell you.

3) CLI went stable today, with its 1.0 release. We'll be moving the docs over to use the CLI everywhere soon - personally, i'd use the CLI to generate a new project and then follow along the tutorials.

[d2kx]

Thank you, that was really helpful!