Angular 2 contracts

[MrMarkyMark]

I guess the encouraging thing here is that both VHS and Betamax are stone cold dead!

Last known VCR maker stops production, 40 years after VHS format launched | Ars Technica UK


Not quite, only just completely dead

And

While most people prefer the look of modern video digital video over VHS, there is a rapidly growing group of collectors seeking out old tapes. Some of the rarer horror movies are worth as much as £1,500.

[dwater]

Is that true though re the best developers - define best? There are always pros and cons with any framework.

What I do see is a crazy amount of fragmentation in frameworks/libraries. In the C# world 10 years ago you were lucky if there were any ORMs available and now you have many different flavours to choose from. Similarly with javascript frameworks - jQuery was only just on the verge of release 10 years ago.

I had a colleague who was much more of a computer scientist than I am. He loved to try out new frameworks and ways to do things. I prefer to build things. He was better at me at that too, but still, I kind of feel like these frameworks are due to overzealous computer scientists just trying to be clever.

I suppose I'm still in two minds about how I feel about application frameworks like Angular. As a permie, I tended to dislike them because they introduced some lock-in both to the app I was developing and to my skill set. As a contractor, I guess I want a skill where there is a lot of demand, like there is for Angular, but also I want to it to be easier to be successful, and I'm not (yet) sure Angular does that as well as other libraries - not least because they keep breaking things every time they make a new release, but also simply from the architectural point of view.

I've read React, which is supposedly a "View" framework, makes life easier. On its own, I don't see it as being comparable with Angular, but when people refer to React I think they're usually also including a set of other libraries and techniques that are somehow recommended.

What I don't like about React, though, is that, if you look at the source for a web page, it tends to be nonsense. IINM, you have to know React in order to even understand its output. I suppose that's somewhat true of other frameworks, but not to the same degree I think.
I also don't like that React abstracts the DOM. This seems to preclude (m)any performance improvements made in the browser, and, well, it just doesn't seem like web programming any more....it kind of totally different and the only similarity is that it uses JavaScript.

Speaking of which, I also have tended to dislike libraries that tend to pull things into JavaScript from HTML and CSS. Again, I can see some point in this - it's surely easier to programme JavaScript than CSS and it more than likely makes life easier; but I doubt that it is the way forward for the web. Is the web's future really all JavaScript? IMO, things should be in HTML as much as possible, CSS for styling where the default isn't what you want, and JavaScript for functionality/dynamic behaviour.
Having said that, I suspect contracting might be changing my opinion - having a single language rather than three surely makes things easier.

Personally, I prefer libraries that provide features and utilities, and can be used in many apps irrespective of their architecture. For this reason, I quite like web components. I think React, in its pure form, is essentially a web component (correct me if I'm wrong), and Angular custom directives seem to be like that too. You can essentially write the component and then use them in any application. I've been using Google Polymer over the past few years and have quite liked that - though it, too, can get complicated when you get into more complicated patterns. Unfortunately, there is precious little demand for Google Polymer, so I fear my investment (time/effort/etc) is mostly wasted there. No, all the demand seems to be for Angular and React, and I'm wishing I had taken the chance to use Angular in my perm position (I had a brush with React, where I developed my distaste for it).

I should be starting a contract tomorrow, my first for about 20 years - it's been a while It just so happens to be using Google Polymer too, so I'm pleased about that.

[ShandyDrinker]

I guess the encouraging thing here is that both VHS and Betamax are stone cold dead!

Too true!

While it may be great for us as developers the sheer number of frameworks out there, I question the value for money clients are getting when a senior dev/tech lead/architect chooses NewShinyThing.js as the latest framework which is also dead in 5-10 years time because an alternative framework become the defacto standard instead.

[munkee]

Agree there will be huge amounts of churn over the coming years. For those who are looking to pick a framework that is going to last, I guess you have to roll with the bare bones of node right now (express core etc).

Even for those people who took a punt on Angular 1 being the defacto must be looking at their code base and wondering where to go now we have Angular 2.

In other news, nice to see someone following correct version control. 2.0 definitely introduced the breaking changes from 1.0.

[pauldee]

I've been skilling up on Angular2 and I've got to say it's not everything I hoped for. AngularJs was OK but a bit 'messy' in places. I was hoping they would have kept it similar but tidied it up a bit. If anything, it's got worse.

There's zero backwards compatibility.

And it's a very leaky abstraction. I feel it's trying to do too much for me, while at the same time I have to know everything that's going on under the hood. It reminds me of ASP.Net Webforms (worst framework ever) when what I really want is ASP.Net MVC.

Could have been good. I'm looking into React.js next, and I hope that's the one I'm looking for. But if it isn't, the framework proliferation will continue until we hit the bullseye.