Goodbye Angular. Praise Este
Short Story
Time box yourself to give 4 pomodoros (2 hours, in normal people talk) to Este and Ember and see which you like better. Angular days are over, Angular 2 will be re-engineered and re-written, and it’s not even properly announced. Polymer and Web Components were a favourite of mine in 2014, but I had to face the hard truth, they are far from being ready.
Slightly Longer Story
Angular as we know it is dead. Vojta Jina and Miso Hevery will be my programming heroes, and they reinvented front end industry as we know it, they capitalised on best what Backbone stacks brought us, and reintroduced testing and proper tooling into it, but Angular 2 is beyond horizon. I can’t recommend Angular to my clients. I can’t recommend it to entrepreneurs.
Most important thing in a technology
I love to code. I love to design too, but this post is about code. I love to write libraries, I love to play with new technologies, I love to read about Cycle and Redux and think on how can I use them. I love to work on my own libraries, that I don’t publish, because let’s be honest. Lodash was pretty awesome, and Ramda is impressive in it’s functional awesomeness. But this is when I wear my hoppy-engineer hat. When I wear professional hat different set of criteria enters the room. And the new set of criteria waters down to the few metrics:
When first prototype will be ready to test?
When can we ship Minimum Loveable Product? (or Minimum Viable Product if you have no soul).
And this is why choice is not between millions of frameworks but between to modern stacks: Este and Ember, because I can start write application logic pretty much immediately, and I don’t even need to even bother with configuration.
Sidenote on Este
Este created by Daniel Steigerwald is actually quite interesting stack, this days it’s React+Flux but in always shift, I like to think of it as a heartbeat of newest yet stable in JavaScript world. I just browsed code for it’s version 3.2, which used CoffeeScript, Soy and Google Closure. If you want to reminiscent old days and old popular technologies I recommend traveling through commits. And thanks to Polyhex Labs for reminding me about Este, I almost went the Ember.