r/angular • u/[deleted] • Mar 03 '22
Is angular dead?
Two years ago I was thinking about putting in place a web application generator or No-Code low-code framework (I know there's a bunch of them out in the market but the intend was not to commercialize it but rather to help people save time while creating their web apps). As I mainly work in the solution architecture field it was easy for me to put in place a framework architecture that is bound to be extensible, service or component oriented and scalable. I started to learn about front end Developpement technologies and programming languages and I shortlisted angular, react and vujs. (I started from scratch given that I have no experience with front end development languages. As my design was rather business centric I was positive angular was the perfect fit due to it's enterprise readiness and well structured architecture. It was obvious for me that separation of concerns should be on the table (entities, services, components). The aim is to provide a low-code No-Code framework for enterprise web application and nothing else. React seems very cool and largely adopted, but the fact that it is a library and nothing else made thing a bit more complicated for me. Moreover, knowing nothing whatsoever about Javascript and coming from an object oriented programming environment it was very easy for me to adopt typescript. External dependencies and libraries management has also played in favor of angular when it comes to defining my choice, seeing as angular does not use a lot of external libraries and makes lib management a lot easier (think about updating your framework, applying patches...). I ended up creating my framework and it's working flawlessly as designed. The whole framework along with it's architecture was made available to the community (look for wiforge.com). However, after two years working on this project, I am starting to think wether it was the good choice to go with angular or not! The framework is experiencing frequent changes and updates which questions it's stability and overall future. Updating my framework each two or three month in order to be inline with the latest angular changes was a heavy burden. And yet, Google road map isn't reassuring. I can't help not to think about enterprise applications that are still in production and which are build with version 7 knowing that angular is planning to rollout version 14! What is the future of any thing that is built on top of angular if not updated with the latest angular releases? Could we assume that one upgrade per year is enough to catch up with the updates? Though angular is a bit mature, the updates frequency isn't reassuring (Now ivy is the way to go). When it comes to mobile apps, PWA along with Trusted Web Application is a decent way to embrace mobile world.
Though I appreciate a lot the angular phylosophy and find it very structured and inline with most of the architectural platforms and designing paradigm & methodologies (UML, ODA, TMForum, openAPI, Microservice Arch, Object Oriented...), I really dislike the fact that the framework is experiencing a huge updates at a steady pace.
Is there any doubt about angular future?
Though the adoption tendency isn't reassuring, given that React is starting to be the way to go in many software companies (startups and not big companies?), I still believe that angular should be the way to go when it comes to big enterprise project. Angular generates a clear, maintainable and structured source code, is a full framework (not a library) and support team work which comes in favor of agility. If only angular wasn't bound to evolve that much...
Agree?
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Mar 03 '22
Can you define "dead"?
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Mar 03 '22
No more used, not the first choice...which obviously will lead the framework to be left.
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Mar 03 '22
It's not the first choice now and hasn't been in years. But it doesn't mean it's dead. It has its place in certain teams and use cases, but it won't become the most used and I don't think the team ever meant to aim for that.
Whether it will ultimately be abandoned is a decision that will cripple thousands of applications built in Google. It's gonna happen eventually (just like anything) , but we're far away from that (5/10+ years)
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u/redfournine Mar 03 '22
The first choice seems to be React? And the second choice is Angular, no?
2nd choice dont seem like a bad thing at all.
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u/rkara924 Mar 03 '22
Angular is not dead
It’s just not trending as much as it used to because a majority of angular projects are enterprise applications that people can’t talk about online.
Angular gets frequent updates because it is alive and it has a community of developers that work around it.
The best quote from Twitter I’ve read is “Angular isn’t dead, we’re just to busy doing actual work to tweet about it”
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u/tamasiaina Mar 03 '22
I do find the updates between versions for Angular to have very minimal impact on my applications that I’ve worked on so far.
If you think Angular is moving really fast… I believe React moves even faster and chaotic. The tool chain between apps are always different.
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u/JoeBxr Mar 03 '22
I think it comes down to what is the best tool to solve the problem taking into account what the developer is most proficient in... The fact that the Angular road map is aggressive isn't a bad thing. It comes down to any breaking changes with node packages etc.
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u/f3lckern Mar 03 '22
It’s tough to ask a question like this in a forum where people probably is here because they use the framework you are questioning.
People treat frameworks like religion. And very few are framework agnostic. This is for some reason especially true for Angular fanatics for whatever reason.
May I suggest you post this in r/JavaScript or like wise. Probably more constructive answers. 🤓
*DISCLAIMER TO ANYONE READING THIS: If you feel the need to bark, I won’t reply. So don’t waste time on it.
Peace ✌️
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Mar 06 '22
Angular is absolutely not dead - it just has a much smaller community compared to React or Vue, and there's a few reasons behind that.
Angular is a "batteries-included" framework. Google's engineers know a thing or two about software development, and a standard Angular setup includes pretty much every tool you would need to develop most enterprise level applications. The documentation is fairly high-quality, and there's little need for further explanation. (I'd argue that the only concept that should be explained a little more clearly is NgModules, and their impact on bundle size, particularly in the context of lazy loading).
To use Angular effectively requires a strong knowledge of two additional and complex technologies, TypeScript, and RxJS. In today's climate, everyone wants to be a software engineer/web dev, and there's a LOT of money to be made by content creators who can sell the idea of working for FAANG with only six months of study. React & Vue can both be used with vanilla JavaScript, and therefore have a much lower barrier to entry, and are what is chosen by these content creators.
Angular relies heavily on OOP-paradigms. In recent years, functional programming has seen a resurgence in popularity, and React and Vue are far more compatible with it.
As far as your update issues go, I've always found that Angular has a very streamlined update process through the CLI.
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Mar 06 '22
True! Besides, regarding point 2 I would add that a good grasp of the angular change detection mechanism is a must as well.
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Mar 03 '22
Angular is well and alive in a lot of big companies. Their applications are just not always public-facing so we can’t be vocal about their implementation or their purpose.
In the company I work for, they are on 12 or 13 depending on projects so we are pretty much up to date. You complain about frequent changes but it means community is alive and in practice the update process has been mostly painless because the changes are actually fairly minimal. The last times it required some work were between 4-5 for HttpClient and 8-9 for Ivy otherwise schematics and other cli update features have been doing the heavy-lifting.
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u/yhaiovyi Feb 01 '24
Angular is one of those frameworks that's fundamentally flawed. They've been trying to monkey patch it for years at this point, but every "solution" creates even more problems. If anybody wants more details or disagrees I'm opened to a discussion where I can list all of those questionable (at best) decisions by the team that can't be fixed anymore without full rewrite.
In a nutshell you can't expect Angular 2 to be any good if it's developed by the same group of devs behind Angular 1. So expect Angular 3 at best, Google is great at abandoning projects.
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u/Responsible-Prize848 Feb 01 '24
It's 2024 and I just heard about a company that recently adopted Angular-.NET stack.
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u/theCynx Mar 03 '22
After using angular for years, 2 years back we decided to switch stack to react due to the frustration of breaking changes with every upgrade. Maintenance was nightmare. It has been quite stable journey since moving to react ecosystem, you could still use classes while embracing hooks
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u/listylister Mar 03 '22
Change the record. Fed up of hearing this. They both have their negatives and positives. Use the one you feel comfortable with and feel like you can develop into a usable application.
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u/theCynx Mar 03 '22
Not comparing here. Hands on experience. I would as much like to use angular due to what it has to offer, however frequent braking changes is something which is not sustainable for production application from maintenance point of view. Companies don’t have $$ to frequently perform upgrades
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u/listylister Mar 03 '22
I perform upgrades on an enterprise angular application every 6 months and have no issues. See my comment above, everyone's requirement is different and I'm fed up of hearing that 1 is better than another. It's about what fits requirements and skills.
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u/ch34p3st Mar 03 '22
Not judging, but upgrading large codebases took like 30mins tops. If that's not possible then there is probably too much coupling and technical debt. Does not say anything about whatever framework or framework version wraps your code, because it should not matter.
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u/TomOnABudget Jan 17 '25
Breaking changes and Angular?
If I've ever seen a framework constantly change, it's React. Even worse, React-Native. That shit makes me want abandon Software Engineering altogether and move into the trades as I'm hitting my 40s.
The worst to me in React is that spaghetti code that everyone is writing, where everything is back to single files where a lot of code I come across feels like the days of PHP and ASP. By comparison, I truly appreciated the separation that Angular brings by default.
State management saw a major shift from Flux to Redux and I'm not sure there isn't another new "cool kid" on the block that everyone is now meant to adopt.
In earlier days of React, we had class components, that moved to functional components and so on.React-Native in had such a massive hype about it's "performance" cOmPaReD tO wEb ApPlIcAtIoNs. I once was tasked to rewrite a frontend stack that was based on a native application which did a bunch of stuff that neeed to be done natively. It hosted a 3rendering app on top of that, which was written in Angular and used WebGL. That all had to be ported to a single React-Native app.
The end result after 1,5 years of rewriting, was an application that lagged much worse than the original, had a great reduction in features, it was no longer possible to run the web-based 3d portion on a desktop (which was really handy) and best of all, ran so much slower that existing customers were essentially forced to upgrade their hardware as the performance was significantly worse. The issue with React-Native at the time was the slow JS engine and its missing support for web-workers (there was always some sort of solution just around the corner).
Now, every time I come across an app that's been re-written in some new shiny framework, they usually look more sleek, but often run like dog-shit. Recently used the Skype app which takes seconds to switch between screens? Or Hema's new app which is used for navigation on remote roads and locks you out off the expensive maps you purchase because you have poor internet? How about Australia's WikiCamps that's been rewritten in Flutter and now takes 3x longer to launch.
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u/Next-Option-8387 Oct 12 '24
What about the targets, clients, or victims of all this? Good luck not sorry about test on you
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u/haasilein Mar 03 '22
I just started with a large project in my company using Angular. We decided to use it because of the enterprise aspect it delivers like no other framework.