AngularJS: A Retrospective

http://www.mutuallyhuman.com/blog/2014/03/25/angularjs-a-retrospective/

by jonahbailey • 12 years ago

40 19 12 years ago

Taking a look back after working with AngularJS for a year.

warfangle• 12 years ago

When you use an unblessed language derivative like Coffeescript for your examples, please give alternate examples (even if they are simply generated by your coffeescript translator). Especially in this case, since Angular isn't targeted specifically at Coffeescript developers.

thoughtpalette• 12 years ago

I agree. Took me a second looking at the example then realizing it was coffee script. Not as helpful to me.

lucisferre4• 12 years ago

Is this just an anti-coffeescript rant or are you actually struggling to follow the examples?

awj• 12 years ago

I think it's a legitimate concern about the ability to read examples. Using nonstandard tools to showcase a concept limits the people who are able to follow along. Not everyone has invested the time to learn the ins and outs of CoffeeScript, why hinder understanding with it when "talking about CoffeeScript" isn't the point of the article?

vkjv• 12 years ago

Not to mention that it saves a whopping 4 lines here. There aren't any CoffeeScript specific features used here, so why use it at all?

udfalkso• 12 years ago

A factory vs. service example would help the article out some.

geuis• 12 years ago

One of the few places where Angular falls down is its use of a single ng-view. This makes doing something as simple as a two column layout frustratingly more complicated than it should be.

Use ui-router. It allows multiple views and uses states for URL routing. It's a little tricky to understand at first, but once you internalize how states work it makes structuring your app very easy. Be prepared to rewrite parts of your projects multiple times until you actually get it.

lucisferre4• 12 years ago

There's also this project: http://angular-route-segment.com/

The $resource service is also not as well designed as it could be. I'm thinking of moving to restangular.

saurabh• 12 years ago

I am using Restangular & ui-router in a project I am working on currently and its working great. Highly recommended.

AdrianRossouw• 12 years ago

I think angular's future is more interesting than it's past or present.

getting rid of the dirty checking? yes please. etc..

PascalW• 12 years ago

Nice article but IMHO it's missing the most important pieces of a retrospective, e.g. "what went wrong" and "what can be improved".

lucisferre4• 12 years ago

Yeah I was hoping for a little more insight. This was mostly a brief tour.

j_baker• 12 years ago

When starting out, forgo writing directives. You need a deep knowledge of AngularJS' internals to debug directives when they misbehave. Instead, start by writing a small controller and view. You can refactor these into a directive later when it feels right.

No. Controllers should not be used for DOM manipulation. Angular directives take some learning, but they're great. It basically turns DOM node selection into a matter of Dependency Injection. I think it's an exaggeration to say that directives require "deep knowledge of AngularJS' (sic) internals".

vedant• 12 years ago

Why the "(sic)"? Is "AngularJS" not the preferred stylization?

mattwad• 12 years ago

not sure if it's what he meant, but the correct possessive should be AngularJS's

acconrad• 12 years ago

Exactly, and this is echoed by the Angular development team (http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/controller).

keda• 12 years ago

I think it's miss-using the service in this example. The example should be using factory: .factory('RemoteResource', function($http){ return {retrieve: function(){ $http.get("url"); }} })

Service should be like this: .service('RemoteResource', function($http){ this.retrieve = function(){ $http.get("url"); } })

See Stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15666048/angular-js-servi...

AngularJS: A Retrospective

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