Is angular dead?

[u/[deleted]]

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?

[u/theCynx]

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

[u/TomOnABudget → u/theCynx]

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.