I've been using Angular on my last couple of projects. It's a big improvement when building complex JavaScript applications, but while some of the basic stuff is pretty simple, some of the more advanced stuff gets complicated quickly and you have to do your homework understanding the underpinnings and some internal details (that are not so well documented either). If something goes wrong with bindings, routing or $scope matching it's terribly difficult to track these sort of things down.

The biggest problem I have with these sorts of frameworks is that there's code scattered all over the place, so it feels like you're constantly editing code in multiple places. Controller, services (or your own business or UI helpers) - the workflow still sucks. Plus you do have to understand a bunch of the inner workings to get routing and template injection to work well.

Both Angular and Ember are big steps in the right direction but it still feels to me we have a long way to go before it becomes reasonably easy to build these type of rich all client apps.

For many of things that people are using Angular/Ember for, backend driven applications would actually be a much better fit. Most business applications using textboxes over data will see very little benefit for writing a client centric app IMHO and the complexity of doing so goes way, way up... Server rendered applications rarely break. JavaScript driven apps, not so much, and debugging them after you've stepped away for a bit is pure hell...

+++ Rick ---


>Anyone using Angular. Working through the Pluralsight class and it looks interesting - seems to model the presentation, business, and data layers in a way that seems logical an familiar to be albeit a little early to tell.
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>Also, any experiences in using Webstorm - the Jetbrains Javascript IDE? As I'm wrapping my head around all the new stuff I find myself increasing thinking SQL Server EF all the way to a web service - Web API and then talking to it entirely from javascript app.
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>I seems that way you can still do heavy server side crunching with TSQL and get all the UI goodies and clientside business rules on the javaside in a platform independent way.
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>I'd love to hear from anyone who has experience of both Knockout and Angular (or who is wandering around in it all like I am :-)