Anyone using AngularJS

sneakyimp

Anyone using AngularJS?

I have been told by perhaps my most respected collaborator that I must look at it. From what I can tell, it seems to be really JS-heavy and intended for the construction of Single-Page Apps (SPAs).

NogDog

Yep, it's all about effectively creating thick clients running in the browser under JavaScript, essentially handling much of the controller logic that used to be reserved for the server side. Being as I'm a server-side specialist these days, I have no direct experience with it, but we use it extensively here for one of our large apps. The server-side devs then primarily work on providing APIs for the client to call.

Weedpacket

Have a look at "MVVM architecture" (Model-View-ViewModel) and "Presentation Model" pattern, which is what AngularJS is built for.

Derokorian

Use it all the time. Have a small amount of love for it. Find it can be very complicated and have a steeeeep learning curve. Also, I just feel like it lends itself to poor performing code. On the flip side, it helps to speed up front end development a lot as you don't have to write all the stuff you would with say jquery. I want this input to have a variable...

<input type="text" ng-model="myVar" />

Then the myVar on scope for that element would get populated with field changes, and the field would change when the var changed... No events to watch, no value setting required, simply tell it what variable to use and done!

Bonesnap

Derokorian;11044635 wrote:
...you don't have to write all the stuff you would with say jquery.

But jQuery promised me I would write less (and do more!). 🙁

sneakyimp

Derokorian;11044635 wrote:
Find it can be very complicated and have a steeeeep learning curve. Also, I just feel like it lends itself to poor performing code.

Any complicated particulars we should be warned about? Can you elaborate on 'poor performing code' ? Seems to me the net result will be to delegate a lot of work to the client away from the server, which is a good thing.

Derokorian

Bonesnap;11044657 wrote:
But jQuery promised me I would write less (and do more!). 🙁

Yes, jQuery definitely gave us that. Angular is built on jQuery, and allows you to write even less. For example, see this simple js fiddle -> http://jsfiddle.net/derokorian/6bfappqn/1/ that would be much more code if you did it with just jQuery 🙂

sneakyimp;11044661 wrote:
Any complicated particulars we should be warned about? Can you elaborate on 'poor performing code' ? Seems to me the net result will be to delegate a lot of work to the client away from the server, which is a good thing.

Yes, its definitely good for the server. However, when you get have a large SPA such as the one I work on daily it can be very poor performing in the client's browser. as for complications, a good dependency loading library, such as RequireJS, helps eliminate the headache of loading everything in just the right order. Things like directives can be hard to wrap ones head around and get them working just right.

sneakyimp

Derokorian;11044635 wrote:
Use it all the time. Have a small amount of love for it. Find it can be very complicated and have a steeeeep learning curve.

OK so I've watched the two videos on the AngularJS home page and I think I understand the basics. But then the steeeeep learning curve kicks in with the "Wire up a Backend" example which leaps beyond the not-fully-explained concept of a controller to services and not-at-all-explained libraries like AngularFire and so on with no helpful video.

Can anyone suggest aids to get beyond the basic understanding into the mid-level stuff?

Also, I see that there are tons of special attributes associated with AngularJS and plenty of classes associated with Bootstrap and I have no idea what they mean or which ones are typically needed. In the video, the guy appears to be using JetBrains which has a pretty amazing autocomplete functionality to it that makes them all available. Anyone have suggestions about IDE tricks that can help speed one's uptake of AngularJS? I suppose I'm fairly well convinced that AngularJS is pretty cool and I'm anxious to tackle this learning curve while I have some time.

Derokorian

egghead.io

sneakyimp

Derokorian;11046739 wrote:
egghead.io

Any specific videos you recommend? They have 227 for AngularJS...

Derokorian

Holy crap! I'll check it out, see if I can find any that I watched... when I watched before there were <25 so I watched most of them.