| The level of FUD here is astounding. AngularJS is not perfect, nor certainly are the major competitors. React seems to be dribbling out a piece at a time to us and each piece gets its own name and arrives in its own time. That makes it a little bit difficult to use as a framework. Hopefully it will all eventually jell and provide a really different take on how to build the front-end. I'd love it if there was a third choice with the same level of support behind it out there to give both of them a run for their money. But this is reality here: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=angularjs%2C%20ember.... See those lines hugging the bottom of the chart? They're everything that isn't AngularJS and React. React is clearly on the uptick and AngularJS on the downtick for the partial Feb data they've got, but everybody else is in the noise level. Yet people here would have you think: 1: It's old! - Really? 1.0 shipped in mid 2012. In three years we will have gone from 1.0 to 1.4 and some work done on 2.0. 2: It's going to change tomorrow when 2.0 comes out. - Really? Have you spoken to the other guy just above? He seems to think it's decrepit, you're worried that anything you build with it will have to be thrown away tomorrow because of its astounding rate of change. 3: Using the Chinese menu system of putting together a front-end framework is perfectly viable. Just pick something from columns A/B/C/D and throw it together and start using it. You'll find lots of people who can answer your questions, there are books written on that particular combo of tech, and there are developers out there by the hundreds you can hire who will have no problem diving right into your projects. No. It doesn't really work that way. Pick an arbitrary grab bag of stuff and maybe you'll make some excellent choices. But you'll have to live with that decision for quite a while. Even a less popular stack like Ember.js is going to get more third party support than whatever you decide upon for yourself. Above all, please do a quick experiment for me. The next time somebody tells you that AngularJS is a dead end and you can't rely on it for years to come, ask them what they would have recommended back in 2013? Just two years ago. What set of stuff would they have advocated then that would be doing so well today and have this long lived future into 2017+ that wasn't AngularJS? Backbone.js? I don't know of anything. My point is this, the front-end and JavaScript tech is changing at a rate way too high for anyone's predictions about two and three years down the road to have a lot of merit. AngularJS seems like a reasonable bet to have done well and have lots of info available about migration from 1.X to 2.0 so at the moment I'm still on that path. In the meantime I hope to learn more about Facebook's stuff to see if it gives me useful ideas or to see if I can incorporate parts of it into AngularJS (Flux seems interesting for instance and would likely slide into most of the frameworks). But the people below who speak with such certainty about the future... Maybe they don't see it as clearly as they think. |