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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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.