Why AngularJS?

I wanted to share a few thoughts about AngularJS

Introduction

AngularJS is a MV* framework for writing manageable, clean, full-featured applications in the browser with JavaScript , It’s also incredibly easy to learn for those who already have HTML and JavaScript experience. Angular’s goal was to create a way for designers to be able to do HTML design using components. One thing that I like about Angular is that, it’s an opinionated MV* framework, It means that it tells you what are the certain ways of doing things, Some people might argue that it’s somehow a limitation for a framework such as Angular because it solves fewer problems, but I think at least it assures to not having spaghetti code.

How I got into AngularJS

I have been sitting on the fence for far too long to chose a great JavaScript framework. Finally a couple of years ago I decided to use AngularJS, and it caught my attention. It actually made me curious to learn more about it. I started to use AngularJS for some parts of my application. At the time Angular team were working on the next version of the framework, So I stopped using it because I heard that the next version is a different framework. Now I have come to the conclusion that it’s better to stick with Angular 1.x, then I can switch to Angular 2 in a right time.

AngularJS Benefites

Angular has lots of great features from testability and two-way binding, to more vague concepts. For me, the best thing about Angular is that it has a flat learning curve So you can get the most of it. All being said here are the some of my favourite features and benefits of Angular:

• Code Reduction: Angular reduces the amount of code that developers write.
• Two Way Binding
• Beautiful syntax and higher-level APIs

For example, take a look this piece of code written in raw JavaScript:

document.getElementById("btn").addEventListener("click", function (el) {
  alert("clicked!");
});

Whereas with Angular you can simple achieve same goal this way:

<button id="btn" ng-click="handleClick()">
  Click Me
</button>;

$scope.handleClick = function () {
  console.log("clicked!");
};

As you can see the Angular code is less complex.

• Popularity
• Testability
  Angular was designed with testing in mind. So you can test any components of your application easily through both unit testing and end to end testing. For unit testing you can use a component called ngMock and for e2e testing you can use Protractor. It is worthwhile to mention that for both cases you can run your tests using a tool called Karma.

AngularJS gotchas

Although Angular is a great framework but it has some problems that you can run into trouble with it. Here are some of them:

• SEO
  For dealing with this issue we can use server side rendering or use a prerenderer,
• Performance
  One thing that causes performance problem in Angular is having too many bindings. If performance is important you can consider using a different rendering engine.
• External Events and Digest Cycle

Conclusion

Even though Angular 2 is coming, But Angular 1 is still a thing and I think Angular 1 will be supported for a long time to come.