A lot of people seem to think that Single Page App frameworks like Angular/Ember are suitable for use on the public facing client side. I've always believed that SPAs are meant to be behind a login, where you don't have to also deal with spiders and other sub-optimal browsing devices, and you have a little bit more wriggle room when it comes to routing and web history.
Just look at Blogger...their client-side rendering is annoying as all get out. It's just a blog post, render it server side and give me the content, then sprinkle on some gracefully degrading JS on top to spice it up.
I say this as a huge proponent of Angular who uses it for all his web app projects who also wouldn't ever use it on a public facing application.
I agree that things like blogger are a great example of what not to do, but I'd go further and say that treating something as a single page web app running on the client side throws away most of the advantages of the web:
URLs which can be stored and shared and are idempotent
Mostly stateless operation for anonymous use (fast to serve/load/cache)
Document formats that anything (including dumb crawlers and future gadgets) can parse and reuse in unexpected ways
What you call suboptimal browsing devices are what makes the web special and distinct from native apps. These are not trivial advantages, and most websites would benefit from these strengths of the web, even if they are an app.
As an example of where something like a single page app can shine on a public site, I've seen chat software which used it which worked really well (using socket.io I think), but only because people didn't care about sharing individual messages and the chat was ephemeral.
Discourse is essentially a SPA (see http://try.discourse.org/) and designed to be public-facing. It does a good job at providing a very bare, lightweight interface for people with JavaScript disabled and, I'm assuming, for web crawlers.
Most websites shouldnt be SPAs. One can still use Angular to code widgets in a regular page based site,without using a js router.
It's just that devs are getting lazy ,they throw a restfull server app quickly then dont want to deal with any view layer on the server and do everything in client-side js. For some projects it make little sense.
Agreed - there is a wealth of applications that are not in the massive scaled consumer market - and making those clean, easy to maintain and deliver is an enormous win. That said, there is a wealth of consumer apps that don't have massive market shares either so the market for learning these lessons is pretty rarefied
The Blogger example doesn't seem fair: Any app can overload the user with too many animations or other distractions.
At Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/) we're building our student / education app in Angular, and are moving all browser-side code to Angular as well – both public and private.
In a lot of our splash or SEO-enabled content we're not making use of all of angular's features, but the upside of using it is that we have a single, unified codebase in which we can share libraries, team knowledge and design patterns. Simply put: Using Angular everywhere allows us to keep DRY. Testing the front-end using purely Angular is yet another core asset at Thinkful.
One framework for writing code and testing is much better than a hybrid of server-side rendering and Angular.
Our biggest challenge was SEO, but this was reasonably easily solved with using BromBone (http://www.brombone.com/).
There are reasons to stick with non-angular or JS frameworks, so it's not always a slam-dunk. For example, if Thinkful had millions of SEO pages that we needed to load as fast as humanly possible Angular would be a bit much... But that's not what we're optimizing for: We're building a phenomenal user-experience that we can support long-term, is well tested, can have a lot of developers use, and can have non-developers do their job inside our codebase (everyone at Thinkful codes).
For all this and more Angular has proven a great choice for both logged-in AND public sites.
Totally agree, but you still have the analytics/tracking problems. Unless you're not tracking clicks/activities/views on your various features. But if that's the case, you have bigger problems :)
Some people use screen readers, text-mode browsers, IE due to stupid work/school policies, etc. Some people like automating their workflow, which can involve scripted browser interactions. Some people actually care about security and privacy, and so run NoScript, etc.
I had the opportunity to work for a million dollar budget client project, about a year ago. (Obviously I'm bound by an NDA, so I won't go into specifics). You can think of this site like an oDesk/Freelancer competitor, but with some social features.
We also had another team from California working on this project, who consistently insisted that we go with Angular for a project of such complexity. Back then, on HN, everybody was writing about how awesome Angular is, and how you must use it for your next project and so on. It reminded me of the early MongoDB days here.
I was under constant pressure from my client too, since he was also reading a lot about Angular everywhere and the Californian company had him almost brainwashed in favor of angular. After already falling trap for the MongoDB buzz (I used MongoDB for the wrong use-case and suffered the consequences), I decided to carefully evaluate the decision to go with Angular for the project.
After about 6 months of using Angular for a different medium-scale project, I decided against it for my client. I realized that Angular is the all powerful Battle Tank. It can do everything you want it to. But it's very tempting to choose a battle tank when all you need is a sedan to get you from home to office.
Angular has it's own use-cases, but for the most part what I observed was that you could get a lot of mileage without using Angular, with just plain Jquery+Knockout (or any other similar framework of your choice) for most of the front-end.
In a simple calculation that I made (to pitch to my client), I estimated about easily 25% of time (and thus money) savings by not going with Angular for our project. (YMMV)
Usually I tend not to open my mouth about/against angular here because most HNers seem to like Angular a lot and they downvote without a reason just for having a different opinion. But, I am really glad someone wrote a blog post about this.
Although angular is aimed at Wide/SinglePage Apps I find it perfectly suited for small scale stuff. It's like a sedan if you wish but with all the safety airbags and comfort of an mvc and the possibility to mount a canon if you move out in the jungle. It gives you a level of confidence I'd find difficult to abandon.
Also I don't see how jquery + knockout is so different from taking the angular/ember road ? (edit: I see why from a legacy point of vue)
Finally the comparison with mongodb is misleading : angular & cie brings your code from procedural mess to a well known structured area, whereas moving away from sql didn't improve any of your architecture it just proposed another one
One of the things that appeals to me about angular is that you can compose your application of smaller angular apps. I think what you're talking about (and the original article) mostly are about single page javascript apps rather than angular specifically. One perk of angular is that you can use it almost exactly like knockout, as a way to get nice two way data binding, without having to go full on SPA. Unlike knockout, it also gives you a nicer enforced structure for your mini apps.
That said, I still go knockout for this sort of thing most of the time because their support for legacy browsers wins out, and in the industries I do work for old versions of IE are sadly common.
I find Angular really helps when you have a fairly complex single-page app that has non-trivial interactions. The complexity tradeoff you make using it is not worth it when you don't have those needs, especially when you have a team of people that need to be up to speed working on it.
I've had a primarily positive experience criticising it and the whole javascript-mandatory mentality in general. Perhaps comparing it to early-2000s Flash sites helps.
Wait, Wait, WAIT. No to angular, but you then casually throw in that instead you went "plain Jquery+Knockout", as if Knockout is commonplace? How is that plain?
Knockout is not commonplace.
They're just alternatives. One is Microsoft's, one Google's. They're both client-side frameworks.
Your post makes no sense at all. All it sounds like is that you're familiar with knockout but not angular and managed to convince the client to use something that everyone else wasn't familiar with, only you.
In fact this post is all about not using client side frameworks like angular. The arguments against it are the same as the one's you'd use against knockout.js. So your post makes even less sense.
This mayaswell be titled: "Why we're paying for re-discovering client-heavy apps are hard or bad." Angular, or <insert hot new JavaScript framework> doesn't particularly matter.
Twitter learned it[1].
Lots of us learned it when we were experimenting as Web 2.0 was being born. Things were far more obvious, far more quickly then, as bandwidth and resources weren't anywhere near what they are today. Back then, we quickly realized that just a couple of delayed asynchronous calls could cause your app to slow to a halt and feel sluggish.
That's not to say it can't be done[2], it's just to say that, thus far for the most part, folks end up discovering reasons why they didn't "do it right" too late over and over. I could be wrong, but I feel like there's been a few posts to Hacker News within the past couple months with similar sentiment.
When people start suggesting client-side rendering, I usually ask something along these lines:
Why on earth would you leave something as simple as textual document model creation up to the client's 5 year old machine that is busy playing a movie, a song, downloading a torrent, doing a Skype call, and running 15 other tabs, when your server is sitting around twiddling it's thumbs with it's 8 cores, scalable, SSD and memory-heavy architecture?
To answer that question -- for the same reason you'd prefer mobile apps on a smartphone. Even in resource-constrained hardware, it makes sense to do things client-side if that's less expensive: no need for server communication on some or all of the app, since it can be cached locally. Sometimes your app can be more expressive than a sequential history of documents loaded one page at a time.
Now, do people really think that way when they adopt these frameworks? Nope. I mean, they might think about speed, but we all know that loading a bit of static HTML and CSS is faster than any JavaScript execution.
That said, I'll ignore my point above and get a bit technical here: Unless you're using Opera Mini, client-side rendering is indeed all we have for "textual document model rendering". That's what we call "HTML" folks when we're not "viewing source". So ... I'd give the client-side a bit of credit here, things will improve with time.
Use the right technology for the job. And that advice keeps changing. Right now, I'm most influenced by http://www.igvita.com/slides/2013/breaking-1s-mobile-barrier... but once you've caching/native, it's a whole different game. And if you add pre-fetching...
That Quora link is behind a sign up wall - would you mind giving a précis?
Additionally I have to say Angular (or any client side framework) seems a poor choice for a consumer facing content driven site. Apps are for actively doing something - not passively reading. Of am I missing the point
I need to stop clicking on the "why we left x for y" articles on HN. Mostly people have picked the wrong tool for the particular job and the articles are just an embarrassment.
Obviously SPAs take a lot of extra work to make search engine friendly and are probably going to be the wrong tool for the job for any site which requires that. Much of the web isn't searchable and doesn't want to be searchable. If you are writing a web app to solve some business problem which sits behind a login angular really isn't a problem.
Think of the millions of poorly maintained and inflexible VB and Java business apps out there that are due to be replaced and the employees who are wanting to do business on the road with their macbooks, chromebooks and tablets. There is your market for Angular.
The Problem is that most of the people only read about "the new fancy JS frameworks" and then they choose it too.
Most articles are so optimistic (because it is new, cool, make fun), that is hard to understand if the "tool" is the right one or not, you see it when you use it.
So i am glad to see when people / companies write about their expierence with the "new" technologies.
Everybody can then verify if the tool is the right tool for a project/problem or not.
E. g. you write "If you are writing a web app to solve some business problem which sits behind a login angular really isn't a problem".
When somebody read this, this person thinks "cool, angular is the right tool for a login backend application".
Slow... depends on what you're used to; I've worked with Java / Maven and such, and one step worse, Scala; if you want slow, go for those.
Complex. The author links to a certain gruntfile[0] as an example of a large, unmaintainable gruntfile, but apparently people forget that a gruntfile is just a Javascript / NodeJS file, and thus can be broken up into more manageable chunks - like any code[1]. Alternatively, there's newer, less config, more code build tools like Gulp.js[2].
#4 is also no longer valid; Angular's Protractor[3] wraps around Selenium etc and deals with angular's asynchronous behaviour, as long as you stay within angular's framework.
And #5 is to be blamed on the developer for not having attention to performance / total load times, not the framework.
I'm defensive, but then, I don't have a public-facing app.
The idea is to keep a lot of the advantages of the traditional web development model, but, via HTML5-style attributes, RESTful URL design and partial driven UX, achieve a better UX.
It's not for everyone or for every problem, and it is still in pre-alpha (we are going to change from a preamble to HTTP headers for meta-directives, for example) but, if you find Angular too heavy-weight and foreign for your UI, it might be of interest.
Please contact me if you are interested in contributing.
I think this method is the way forward for most document based sites/apps. Last year I built something similar to intercooler (nice lib btw) for our product to great success. Makes things so much simpler to develop and maintain.
Have you tried react.js [1] ? If you use node to serve your content, you can pre-render the initial state of your app. When everything loads up, react will take a checksum of the rendered portions to ensure that it doesn't re-render the same DOM. This should come close to solving your SEO/test issues with minimal work.
In my opinion, a setup like this is close to what the next big wave of frameworks will use.
You can break your layout up into parts and have a site that is partially dynamic and partially static. You just pass the html that react renders to your templating engine.
Getting everything setup correctly can be a little hassle, but gulp is fast enough when doing a watch on the compilation step. Of course, because everything is javascript you share the exact same component code between client and server.
Haven't tried it, but I heard great things about it from bradfitz, who uses it on http://camlistore.org/ (and whose opinion definitely deserves respect). Is React an all-or-nothing thing, or can you sprinkle it in certain places on your site without needing to make the whole site in React?
> you can pre-render the initial state of your app
This, I think, is the killer feature of Node, and the reason I'm slowly transitioning from Python for new web projects. You can reuse your server-side templates client-side (without worrying about, say, reimplementing Handlebars Helpers in your server-side language), and can easily render full HTML templates for the client that get enhanced when the client-side JS loads. This also solves UI nuisances -- like your server's markdown renderer being different to your client-side preview (grr).
Meteor and Derby are obviously heading down this path, and while I'm not sold on the rest of Node and the general JS style, having the same language in the browser and the server is too much to pass up.
One thing people don't really think about is that this whole notion of SPA is kind of a pipe-dream, overkill. There might be some apps that are really a single page application (likely just those simple, demo add task apps), but most really can be broken down and composed of many mini-applications.
For example, how often do your users go to their settings page? Does that need to be part of the SPA? Have a complex Settings pages that's composed of 5 or six tabs and 20 different user interactions? Maybe the settings page is itself it's own mini-SPA
How does a user flow through your app, do they really need every screen bundled under a single SPA?
Routing issues, complexity, code dependencies, etc...are all good reasons to not make one monolithic application, even if it's behind a login.
Likely your SPA should really be an app composed of a bunch of smaller SPAs. You search functionality...mini app, your separate workflows...a mini app, your timeline...mini app. history view...mini app, etc...
Breaking your app down into a bunch of smaller SPAs has a lot of advantages and implicit modularization, as well as productivity gains when working on bigger projects with bigger teams.
We're using Backbone+React so this may not be applicable.
However...
“You can separate your dev and production build pipelines to improve dev speed, but that’s going to bite you later on.”
In my experience, you must separate dev and prod pipelines. It has never bitten me because I make hundreds dev (local) and dozens kinda-prod (staging server) builds a day.
For dev builds, Grunt just compiles LESS but doesn't touch the scripts so there is literally no delay there. In dev environment, we load scripts via RequireJS so there is no need to maintain a properly sorted list of scripts too.
For production, we concat them with grunt-contrib-requirejs with `almond: true` so RequireJS itself is stripped out completely. Production build takes time (10 to 15 seconds; we're also running Closure Compiler), but it's never a problem.
Even adding JSX (Facebook React) compilation didn't cause a slowdown for dev builds because grunt-contrib-watches compiles them on change and puts into a mounted directory.
Yes, we did use separate dev and prod pipelines when we used AngularJS. (We used https://github.com/ngbp/ng-boilerplate.) It took 2-3sec for the dev build (most of which was taken up by recess) and 30-45sec for the prod build (primarily JS uglification). However, probably 5-10 times we deployed a broken site because either 1) the LESS compiler changed the order of our CSS rules or 2) we used AngularJS DI syntax somewhere that ngmin couldn't handle. We fixed the issues and added better linting, but it's still one more thing to think about (and the theme of this article is that it was death by a thousand cuts, not one big show-stopper).
I am curious to know why you go for a full js app approach from the begining, knowing that your app would be very dependable from content that needed be indexed by search engines overall?
I have to disagree with most of this article.
1. Bad search ranking and Twitter/Facebook previews
Don't force your public side to strictly angular. Serve normal pages and use angular for your interactive components. Let Google index a well formed dom. Use a full angular stack for your non public facing application(a SaaS application). You don't want to index this anyways.
2. Flaky stats and monitoring
Use event driven metrics from your api and or client side. Track everything in the sense of user, controller, action, params. Blacklist sensitive data. Derive metrics with funnels, user did x actions, returned and subscribed. Conversion! It's all there just understand your events.
3. Slow, complex build tools.
Your not limited to grunt, or node. For example we use rails and use our own buildscripts and generators to build fullstack angular apps. Easy Breezy.
4. Slow, flaky tests
There is room for improvement. But jasmine and phantom can get the job done. But let's not forget were also testing our api. Use your goto testing framework and let jasmine phantomn do the client frontend testing.
5. Slowness is swept under the rug, not addressed
Precompile your angular templates, only wait for api responses. Don't fragment your page load into seperate request. Resolve all the requires data beforehand in the route provider.
I’m as big an Angular evangelist as anyone, but that bit about search rankings is an absolute killer.
You talk about these server-side webkit parsers as tricks that “slow things down,” which indicates that you at least ultimately got them working. I never got that far.
As someone who is familiar with AngularJS but hasn't used it much, the idea that the best answer running WebKit on the server, indexing your client-side generated pages and dumping them out into a Google-indexable static resource just blows my mind.
If you're OK to delegate the scraping process to a SaaS then you may be interested by SEO4Ajax [1] which will make it much simpler. Disclaimer: I'm one of the co-founder.
For sake of correctness — recent versions of Phantom.js are not dependent on Xvfb or any other variant of X, and there are grandmotherly prepared binary builds on the official website (kinda statically linked, so no dependency on WebKit as well).
Not that it changes the author's arguments that much, but just worth pointing out.
I'm currently playing with Fay (haskell2js compiler)... It's awesome.
It type checks like haskell and allows code sharing between serverside and clientside of the app. This means i can use code to generate a complete HTML site (for SEO purposes) when the URL is hit directly and modify the DOM from there once the app is loaded... with the same code!
Obviously this is code sharing is mostly interesting to app written in haskell. But I'm so excited about it that i had to share... :)
G'luck! The "javascript problem" (try google for that) is a hard one.
[edit] i call it "playing with Fay", but im certain this will end up on production for me.
I used AngularJS + Express for a reasonably sized custom news app for a client. It does everything form payments, to security, ya know, all the shebang.
I agree with is the first but only if you're still in the days of SEO trolling. Frankly it's just not as important if you're doing your other marketing aspects right.
For #2, I think there are plenty of ways to build in analytics. We use angularlytics and it works pretty well. Took me like 5 minutes to setup.
#3 - Yeoman. Generator Angular. Here's how I do it:
1. Make a client dir, and yeoman up your project with generator angular.
2. Make a server dir and setup an express server.
3. Grunt serve your client dir
4. Make it so express watches your .tmp and app folders for local dev
5. Run your express server
6. When your ready to serve it, Grunt build to a dist folder in your server folder
7. For production, have express serve the dist folder
Yeah kind of dirty (since you're running two local servers for dev), but hell, it's fast as can be to setup and a pleasure.
#4 Tests? If you're doing tests of any sort, they're bound to slow you down to an extent.
#5 Isn't this applicable to all web apps? Mistakes and mismanagement of loading resources is a problem for anything.
Sure it has it's problems, but there's just far too much productivity to be gained from using it. For example, Ajax animations are beyond time saving.
The real problem with angular is the terrible docs ;)
Really, this seems to be more of a case of the wrong tool being used for the wrong job than a tool with flaws and no real use. AngularJS positions itself as a fit-all solution for great Javascript based applications, when in reality it is meant for use only in an authenticated user setting. Look to an application like Asana (built on a similar internal Javascript framework), you only get the Javascript application version after you've logged in, not before.
It's like creating an online store and deciding to choose MongoDB or any other NoSQL branded database and then discover it doesn't support transactions and having to move over to a RDBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL. The caveats listed in the article are definitely true though. As someone who's used AngularJS enough to know its downfalls, it's definitely not a one sized fits all solution and much like anything it comes with both its own pros and cons.
It's important you spend the extra amount of time when planning your project to ensure you choose the right tools for the right job (well at least at the time). If your requirement is to be indexable via search engines, choose a solution that allows that and so on. Don't use something just because it's the flavour of the day on the HN front-page.
> 1. Bad search ranking and Twitter/Facebook previews
This problem is patently obvious to the most cursory examination of single-page applications. If SEO is important, and you want to do an SPA, then you must be willing to bear the cost of addressing HTML requests. For my startup, I wanted to keep things DRY, which lead me early on to the Nustache engine for ASP.NET, allowing me to use the same Mustache templates on server and client. This doesn't have anything like the complexity described in the article.
> 2. Flaky stats and monitoring
Simply not true. Using Google Analytics and Backbone, you simply listen to the Backbone.history:route event and fire off a pageview using the Google Analytics API.
> 3. Slow, complex build tools
Complex, yes. Slow? Using r.js, no slower than a typical static language build.
> 4. Slow, flaky tests
Slow, yes, but no more so than desktop app test automation. I've found PhantomJS with QUnit (unit-testing), and CasperJS for integration testing to be quite reliable. It took a few days to get everything connected (scripting IIS Express to start and end in the background being the trickiest bit), but that was it.
> 5. Slowness is swept under the rug, not addressed
This is a UX challenge that is known and obvious up-front. Failing to address it is a design problem, not a technological one.
Overall, this seems the result of the ineptitude prevalent in inexperienced, "move fast, break things" teams. Rather than owning up to moving too fast and foregoing due analysis/research, they blame technology. Or, the article is a marketing ploy.
I, am/was a big fan of Angular, but on a recent project decided we didn't have the right team composition for a lot of the coding styles and complexities angular introduces. We went with a JQuery/Knockout solution, too. Some of the devs still struggle to keep the viewmodels clean, but being able to integrate from knockout to existing JQuery plugins has been a big win. Writing custom angular directives, adding another layer to existing Jquery is a pain for a lot of front end developers, and likely overkill for many projects.
(to give scope size, we're replacing a several hundred screen Adobe Flex app with our new KO/JQuery app)
This is really a case of picking the wrong tool for the job. __This is in no way a slight of the author__...b/c I have done worse on more than one occasion, so thanks for sharing.
To anyone reading, you really should understand your workload before picking tools. And, you need to understand the difference between Web Application vs. Web Site: Which are you building?
Server-side rending is the winner for content sites (as mentioned by the author). Beyond initial rendering, a server-side solution allows for more caching. Depending on the site you could even push a good amount of file delivery to a CDN. In the end the author switched to Go, but Node.js + Express, RoR, PHP, Java with Play, etc. would all work just as well.
Next, are you CPU bound or network bound or I/O bound. If you're writing an application that requires heavy calculations that utilize massive amounts of CPU, then pick the appropriate framework (i.e. not Node). If you are I/O bound then Node may be a great solution.
Client-side rending (such as Angular/Backbone/etc) really shine when you need a web application (not web site). These frameworks are best when the application code is significant relative to the data such that many small JSON requests deliver better overall performance. Think of a traditional desktop application or native mobile app where the application code is in MB, but the amount of data required per request is in bytes. The same logic applies to web apps.
A few areas where problems such as what the author experienced emerged from blanked statements about technologies:
1. Gulp vs. Grunt: I use Grunt. I may switch to Gulp. But seriously, which one is "more complex", "faster", can be quantified. Lots of people pick the wrong technology because the web is littered with echo'd opinion statements. Exchange "more complex" for project A has a config file with X number of lines, while project B has a configuration of Y number of lines for the same task. Or project A uses JSON for its configuration while project B uses YAML.
2. "Or we could have used a different framework) - with a link to Meteor" - No please do NOT use Meteor for your site. I love Meteor and want it to succeed, but it is not the optimal choice for a content heavy site where each user views a large amount of data. As mentioned above, use a server-side rendering solution (like you did with Go), then cache, then push to a CDN. Problem solved. Meteor is awesome and is a great real-time framework. Use it when you need real-time capabilities...but not for a content heavy, static site.
> but they just weren’t the right tools for our site.
This could have been the title or first sentence and would have delivered 100% of the message if the reader read no further.
A lot of these articles about why we changed from technology A to B could be much improved if the original decision making was documented (not just the switch). As in we picked project A because we thought it would deliver A, B and C benefits based on our applications required capabilities. However, our application really needed capabilities M, N and O, which project A was not a good fit for. So, we switched to project B and experienced the following improvements. Therefore, it can be concluded that if your application needs M, N and O then project B will be a better fit.
[+] [-] dchuk|12 years ago|reply
Just look at Blogger...their client-side rendering is annoying as all get out. It's just a blog post, render it server side and give me the content, then sprinkle on some gracefully degrading JS on top to spice it up.
I say this as a huge proponent of Angular who uses it for all his web app projects who also wouldn't ever use it on a public facing application.
[+] [-] grey-area|12 years ago|reply
URLs which can be stored and shared and are idempotent
Mostly stateless operation for anonymous use (fast to serve/load/cache)
Document formats that anything (including dumb crawlers and future gadgets) can parse and reuse in unexpected ways
What you call suboptimal browsing devices are what makes the web special and distinct from native apps. These are not trivial advantages, and most websites would benefit from these strengths of the web, even if they are an app.
As an example of where something like a single page app can shine on a public site, I've seen chat software which used it which worked really well (using socket.io I think), but only because people didn't care about sharing individual messages and the chat was ephemeral.
[+] [-] anonova|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camus2|12 years ago|reply
Most websites shouldnt be SPAs. One can still use Angular to code widgets in a regular page based site,without using a js router.
It's just that devs are getting lazy ,they throw a restfull server app quickly then dont want to deal with any view layer on the server and do everything in client-side js. For some projects it make little sense.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EC1|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darrellsilver|12 years ago|reply
At Thinkful (http://www.thinkful.com/) we're building our student / education app in Angular, and are moving all browser-side code to Angular as well – both public and private.
In a lot of our splash or SEO-enabled content we're not making use of all of angular's features, but the upside of using it is that we have a single, unified codebase in which we can share libraries, team knowledge and design patterns. Simply put: Using Angular everywhere allows us to keep DRY. Testing the front-end using purely Angular is yet another core asset at Thinkful.
One framework for writing code and testing is much better than a hybrid of server-side rendering and Angular.
Our biggest challenge was SEO, but this was reasonably easily solved with using BromBone (http://www.brombone.com/).
There are reasons to stick with non-angular or JS frameworks, so it's not always a slam-dunk. For example, if Thinkful had millions of SEO pages that we needed to load as fast as humanly possible Angular would be a bit much... But that's not what we're optimizing for: We're building a phenomenal user-experience that we can support long-term, is well tested, can have a lot of developers use, and can have non-developers do their job inside our codebase (everyone at Thinkful codes).
For all this and more Angular has proven a great choice for both logged-in AND public sites.
[+] [-] encoderer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blueskin_|12 years ago|reply
Some people use screen readers, text-mode browsers, IE due to stupid work/school policies, etc. Some people like automating their workflow, which can involve scripted browser interactions. Some people actually care about security and privacy, and so run NoScript, etc.
[+] [-] novaleaf|12 years ago|reply
Here's a link with all the nginx config you need to make it work: https://phantomjscloud.com/site/docs.html#advanced_seo
[+] [-] jaunkst|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neya|12 years ago|reply
We also had another team from California working on this project, who consistently insisted that we go with Angular for a project of such complexity. Back then, on HN, everybody was writing about how awesome Angular is, and how you must use it for your next project and so on. It reminded me of the early MongoDB days here.
I was under constant pressure from my client too, since he was also reading a lot about Angular everywhere and the Californian company had him almost brainwashed in favor of angular. After already falling trap for the MongoDB buzz (I used MongoDB for the wrong use-case and suffered the consequences), I decided to carefully evaluate the decision to go with Angular for the project.
After about 6 months of using Angular for a different medium-scale project, I decided against it for my client. I realized that Angular is the all powerful Battle Tank. It can do everything you want it to. But it's very tempting to choose a battle tank when all you need is a sedan to get you from home to office.
Angular has it's own use-cases, but for the most part what I observed was that you could get a lot of mileage without using Angular, with just plain Jquery+Knockout (or any other similar framework of your choice) for most of the front-end.
In a simple calculation that I made (to pitch to my client), I estimated about easily 25% of time (and thus money) savings by not going with Angular for our project. (YMMV)
Usually I tend not to open my mouth about/against angular here because most HNers seem to like Angular a lot and they downvote without a reason just for having a different opinion. But, I am really glad someone wrote a blog post about this.
[+] [-] electrotype|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] charlysisto|12 years ago|reply
Also I don't see how jquery + knockout is so different from taking the angular/ember road ? (edit: I see why from a legacy point of vue)
Finally the comparison with mongodb is misleading : angular & cie brings your code from procedural mess to a well known structured area, whereas moving away from sql didn't improve any of your architecture it just proposed another one
[+] [-] chadcf|12 years ago|reply
That said, I still go knockout for this sort of thing most of the time because their support for legacy browsers wins out, and in the industries I do work for old versions of IE are sadly common.
[+] [-] ehutch79|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmicali|12 years ago|reply
I find Angular really helps when you have a fairly complex single-page app that has non-trivial interactions. The complexity tradeoff you make using it is not worth it when you don't have those needs, especially when you have a team of people that need to be up to speed working on it.
Knockout's simplicity is hard to beat.
[+] [-] Nate630|12 years ago|reply
Sometimes certain libraries 'make sense' to me. Sometimes other people on a project choose a library because it makes sense to them.
I like that you tried to make it clear to your client by putting it in the time/money perspective.
[+] [-] blueskin_|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mattmanser|12 years ago|reply
Knockout is not commonplace.
They're just alternatives. One is Microsoft's, one Google's. They're both client-side frameworks.
Your post makes no sense at all. All it sounds like is that you're familiar with knockout but not angular and managed to convince the client to use something that everyone else wasn't familiar with, only you.
In fact this post is all about not using client side frameworks like angular. The arguments against it are the same as the one's you'd use against knockout.js. So your post makes even less sense.
[+] [-] randomdrake|12 years ago|reply
Twitter learned it[1].
Lots of us learned it when we were experimenting as Web 2.0 was being born. Things were far more obvious, far more quickly then, as bandwidth and resources weren't anywhere near what they are today. Back then, we quickly realized that just a couple of delayed asynchronous calls could cause your app to slow to a halt and feel sluggish.
That's not to say it can't be done[2], it's just to say that, thus far for the most part, folks end up discovering reasons why they didn't "do it right" too late over and over. I could be wrong, but I feel like there's been a few posts to Hacker News within the past couple months with similar sentiment.
When people start suggesting client-side rendering, I usually ask something along these lines:
Why on earth would you leave something as simple as textual document model creation up to the client's 5 year old machine that is busy playing a movie, a song, downloading a torrent, doing a Skype call, and running 15 other tabs, when your server is sitting around twiddling it's thumbs with it's 8 cores, scalable, SSD and memory-heavy architecture?
[1] - https://blog.twitter.com/2012/improving-performance-on-twitt...
[2] - http://www.quora.com/Web-Development/What-are-the-tradeoffs-...
[+] [-] lstamour|12 years ago|reply
Now, do people really think that way when they adopt these frameworks? Nope. I mean, they might think about speed, but we all know that loading a bit of static HTML and CSS is faster than any JavaScript execution.
That said, I'll ignore my point above and get a bit technical here: Unless you're using Opera Mini, client-side rendering is indeed all we have for "textual document model rendering". That's what we call "HTML" folks when we're not "viewing source". So ... I'd give the client-side a bit of credit here, things will improve with time.
Use the right technology for the job. And that advice keeps changing. Right now, I'm most influenced by http://www.igvita.com/slides/2013/breaking-1s-mobile-barrier... but once you've caching/native, it's a whole different game. And if you add pre-fetching...
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|12 years ago|reply
Additionally I have to say Angular (or any client side framework) seems a poor choice for a consumer facing content driven site. Apps are for actively doing something - not passively reading. Of am I missing the point
[+] [-] shirro|12 years ago|reply
Obviously SPAs take a lot of extra work to make search engine friendly and are probably going to be the wrong tool for the job for any site which requires that. Much of the web isn't searchable and doesn't want to be searchable. If you are writing a web app to solve some business problem which sits behind a login angular really isn't a problem.
Think of the millions of poorly maintained and inflexible VB and Java business apps out there that are due to be replaced and the employees who are wanting to do business on the road with their macbooks, chromebooks and tablets. There is your market for Angular.
[+] [-] prottmann|12 years ago|reply
Most articles are so optimistic (because it is new, cool, make fun), that is hard to understand if the "tool" is the right one or not, you see it when you use it.
So i am glad to see when people / companies write about their expierence with the "new" technologies. Everybody can then verify if the tool is the right tool for a project/problem or not.
E. g. you write "If you are writing a web app to solve some business problem which sits behind a login angular really isn't a problem". When somebody read this, this person thinks "cool, angular is the right tool for a login backend application".
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|12 years ago|reply
Slow... depends on what you're used to; I've worked with Java / Maven and such, and one step worse, Scala; if you want slow, go for those.
Complex. The author links to a certain gruntfile[0] as an example of a large, unmaintainable gruntfile, but apparently people forget that a gruntfile is just a Javascript / NodeJS file, and thus can be broken up into more manageable chunks - like any code[1]. Alternatively, there's newer, less config, more code build tools like Gulp.js[2].
#4 is also no longer valid; Angular's Protractor[3] wraps around Selenium etc and deals with angular's asynchronous behaviour, as long as you stay within angular's framework.
And #5 is to be blamed on the developer for not having attention to performance / total load times, not the framework.
I'm defensive, but then, I don't have a public-facing app.
[0] https://github.com/ngbp/ngbp/blob/v0.3.1-release/Gruntfile.j... [1] http://www.thomasboyt.com/2013/09/01/maintainable-grunt.html [2] http://gulpjs.com/ [3] https://github.com/angular/protractor
[+] [-] carsongross|12 years ago|reply
http://intercoolerjs.org/
The idea is to keep a lot of the advantages of the traditional web development model, but, via HTML5-style attributes, RESTful URL design and partial driven UX, achieve a better UX.
It's not for everyone or for every problem, and it is still in pre-alpha (we are going to change from a preamble to HTTP headers for meta-directives, for example) but, if you find Angular too heavy-weight and foreign for your UI, it might be of interest.
Please contact me if you are interested in contributing.
[+] [-] srgpqt|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mh-|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlau1|12 years ago|reply
In my opinion, a setup like this is close to what the next big wave of frameworks will use.
You can break your layout up into parts and have a site that is partially dynamic and partially static. You just pass the html that react renders to your templating engine.
Getting everything setup correctly can be a little hassle, but gulp is fast enough when doing a watch on the compilation step. Of course, because everything is javascript you share the exact same component code between client and server.
This is a good example that helped me a bit[2]
[1] http://facebook.github.io/react/ [2] https://github.com/mhart/react-server-example
[+] [-] sqs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frio|12 years ago|reply
Meteor and Derby are obviously heading down this path, and while I'm not sold on the rest of Node and the general JS style, having the same language in the browser and the server is too much to pass up.
[+] [-] taude|12 years ago|reply
For example, how often do your users go to their settings page? Does that need to be part of the SPA? Have a complex Settings pages that's composed of 5 or six tabs and 20 different user interactions? Maybe the settings page is itself it's own mini-SPA
How does a user flow through your app, do they really need every screen bundled under a single SPA?
Routing issues, complexity, code dependencies, etc...are all good reasons to not make one monolithic application, even if it's behind a login.
Likely your SPA should really be an app composed of a bunch of smaller SPAs. You search functionality...mini app, your separate workflows...a mini app, your timeline...mini app. history view...mini app, etc...
Breaking your app down into a bunch of smaller SPAs has a lot of advantages and implicit modularization, as well as productivity gains when working on bigger projects with bigger teams.
[+] [-] hrayr|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danabramov|12 years ago|reply
However...
“You can separate your dev and production build pipelines to improve dev speed, but that’s going to bite you later on.”
In my experience, you must separate dev and prod pipelines. It has never bitten me because I make hundreds dev (local) and dozens kinda-prod (staging server) builds a day.
For dev builds, Grunt just compiles LESS but doesn't touch the scripts so there is literally no delay there. In dev environment, we load scripts via RequireJS so there is no need to maintain a properly sorted list of scripts too.
For production, we concat them with grunt-contrib-requirejs with `almond: true` so RequireJS itself is stripped out completely. Production build takes time (10 to 15 seconds; we're also running Closure Compiler), but it's never a problem.
Even adding JSX (Facebook React) compilation didn't cause a slowdown for dev builds because grunt-contrib-watches compiles them on change and puts into a mounted directory.
[+] [-] sqs|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbeja|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaunkst|12 years ago|reply
2. Flaky stats and monitoring Use event driven metrics from your api and or client side. Track everything in the sense of user, controller, action, params. Blacklist sensitive data. Derive metrics with funnels, user did x actions, returned and subscribed. Conversion! It's all there just understand your events.
3. Slow, complex build tools. Your not limited to grunt, or node. For example we use rails and use our own buildscripts and generators to build fullstack angular apps. Easy Breezy.
4. Slow, flaky tests There is room for improvement. But jasmine and phantom can get the job done. But let's not forget were also testing our api. Use your goto testing framework and let jasmine phantomn do the client frontend testing.
5. Slowness is swept under the rug, not addressed Precompile your angular templates, only wait for api responses. Don't fragment your page load into seperate request. Resolve all the requires data beforehand in the route provider.
[+] [-] Eric_WVGG|12 years ago|reply
You talk about these server-side webkit parsers as tricks that “slow things down,” which indicates that you at least ultimately got them working. I never got that far.
[+] [-] untog|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gildas|12 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.seo4ajax.com
[+] [-] kirushik|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cies|12 years ago|reply
It type checks like haskell and allows code sharing between serverside and clientside of the app. This means i can use code to generate a complete HTML site (for SEO purposes) when the URL is hit directly and modify the DOM from there once the app is loaded... with the same code!
Obviously this is code sharing is mostly interesting to app written in haskell. But I'm so excited about it that i had to share... :)
G'luck! The "javascript problem" (try google for that) is a hard one.
[edit] i call it "playing with Fay", but im certain this will end up on production for me.
[+] [-] colemorrison|12 years ago|reply
I agree with is the first but only if you're still in the days of SEO trolling. Frankly it's just not as important if you're doing your other marketing aspects right.
For #2, I think there are plenty of ways to build in analytics. We use angularlytics and it works pretty well. Took me like 5 minutes to setup.
#3 - Yeoman. Generator Angular. Here's how I do it:
1. Make a client dir, and yeoman up your project with generator angular. 2. Make a server dir and setup an express server. 3. Grunt serve your client dir 4. Make it so express watches your .tmp and app folders for local dev 5. Run your express server 6. When your ready to serve it, Grunt build to a dist folder in your server folder 7. For production, have express serve the dist folder
Yeah kind of dirty (since you're running two local servers for dev), but hell, it's fast as can be to setup and a pleasure.
#4 Tests? If you're doing tests of any sort, they're bound to slow you down to an extent.
#5 Isn't this applicable to all web apps? Mistakes and mismanagement of loading resources is a problem for anything.
Sure it has it's problems, but there's just far too much productivity to be gained from using it. For example, Ajax animations are beyond time saving.
The real problem with angular is the terrible docs ;)
[+] [-] DigitalSea|12 years ago|reply
It's like creating an online store and deciding to choose MongoDB or any other NoSQL branded database and then discover it doesn't support transactions and having to move over to a RDBMS like MySQL or PostgreSQL. The caveats listed in the article are definitely true though. As someone who's used AngularJS enough to know its downfalls, it's definitely not a one sized fits all solution and much like anything it comes with both its own pros and cons.
It's important you spend the extra amount of time when planning your project to ensure you choose the right tools for the right job (well at least at the time). If your requirement is to be indexable via search engines, choose a solution that allows that and so on. Don't use something just because it's the flavour of the day on the HN front-page.
[+] [-] mcgwiz|12 years ago|reply
> 1. Bad search ranking and Twitter/Facebook previews
This problem is patently obvious to the most cursory examination of single-page applications. If SEO is important, and you want to do an SPA, then you must be willing to bear the cost of addressing HTML requests. For my startup, I wanted to keep things DRY, which lead me early on to the Nustache engine for ASP.NET, allowing me to use the same Mustache templates on server and client. This doesn't have anything like the complexity described in the article.
> 2. Flaky stats and monitoring
Simply not true. Using Google Analytics and Backbone, you simply listen to the Backbone.history:route event and fire off a pageview using the Google Analytics API.
> 3. Slow, complex build tools
Complex, yes. Slow? Using r.js, no slower than a typical static language build.
> 4. Slow, flaky tests
Slow, yes, but no more so than desktop app test automation. I've found PhantomJS with QUnit (unit-testing), and CasperJS for integration testing to be quite reliable. It took a few days to get everything connected (scripting IIS Express to start and end in the background being the trickiest bit), but that was it.
> 5. Slowness is swept under the rug, not addressed
This is a UX challenge that is known and obvious up-front. Failing to address it is a design problem, not a technological one.
Overall, this seems the result of the ineptitude prevalent in inexperienced, "move fast, break things" teams. Rather than owning up to moving too fast and foregoing due analysis/research, they blame technology. Or, the article is a marketing ploy.
[+] [-] balls187|12 years ago|reply
Substitute any other flavor and the same problems exist.
[+] [-] taude|12 years ago|reply
(to give scope size, we're replacing a several hundred screen Adobe Flex app with our new KO/JQuery app)
[+] [-] akbar501|12 years ago|reply
To anyone reading, you really should understand your workload before picking tools. And, you need to understand the difference between Web Application vs. Web Site: Which are you building?
Server-side rending is the winner for content sites (as mentioned by the author). Beyond initial rendering, a server-side solution allows for more caching. Depending on the site you could even push a good amount of file delivery to a CDN. In the end the author switched to Go, but Node.js + Express, RoR, PHP, Java with Play, etc. would all work just as well.
Next, are you CPU bound or network bound or I/O bound. If you're writing an application that requires heavy calculations that utilize massive amounts of CPU, then pick the appropriate framework (i.e. not Node). If you are I/O bound then Node may be a great solution.
Client-side rending (such as Angular/Backbone/etc) really shine when you need a web application (not web site). These frameworks are best when the application code is significant relative to the data such that many small JSON requests deliver better overall performance. Think of a traditional desktop application or native mobile app where the application code is in MB, but the amount of data required per request is in bytes. The same logic applies to web apps.
A few areas where problems such as what the author experienced emerged from blanked statements about technologies:
1. Gulp vs. Grunt: I use Grunt. I may switch to Gulp. But seriously, which one is "more complex", "faster", can be quantified. Lots of people pick the wrong technology because the web is littered with echo'd opinion statements. Exchange "more complex" for project A has a config file with X number of lines, while project B has a configuration of Y number of lines for the same task. Or project A uses JSON for its configuration while project B uses YAML.
2. "Or we could have used a different framework) - with a link to Meteor" - No please do NOT use Meteor for your site. I love Meteor and want it to succeed, but it is not the optimal choice for a content heavy site where each user views a large amount of data. As mentioned above, use a server-side rendering solution (like you did with Go), then cache, then push to a CDN. Problem solved. Meteor is awesome and is a great real-time framework. Use it when you need real-time capabilities...but not for a content heavy, static site.
> but they just weren’t the right tools for our site.
This could have been the title or first sentence and would have delivered 100% of the message if the reader read no further.
A lot of these articles about why we changed from technology A to B could be much improved if the original decision making was documented (not just the switch). As in we picked project A because we thought it would deliver A, B and C benefits based on our applications required capabilities. However, our application really needed capabilities M, N and O, which project A was not a good fit for. So, we switched to project B and experienced the following improvements. Therefore, it can be concluded that if your application needs M, N and O then project B will be a better fit.