I haven’t had an opportunity to work with AngularJS in a number of months, but talking to a prospective client recently reminded me how much I love the framwork and the community.

Makes Complex Things Simple

In addition to that client conversation, I’ve also been working on a client app this month where AngularJS seemed like a bit of a heavy weight solution. The app doesn’t have very many pages. Client-side routing seemed undesirable from a “keep it simple” stand-point. These and a few other design factors lead me to build it purely in jQuery.

I have to admit, this was my first heavily interactive (if small) application built with just jQuery. I probably could have done without jQuery, but we were using bootstrap so jQuery was there already anyway. I quickly found that my solution wasn’t very well architected for this particular problem-space. Specifically, I found myself writing a lot of extra code to handle state transitions related to changes in the data model after Ajax requests completed.

I was trying to keep things simple by not using AngularJS, but in reality I think I could have saved myself hours of development time and left a more maintanable project if I had used a more structured framework. Did I need AngularJS to do that? Maybe not. But Angular’s structural pattern generally helps developers “fall into the pit of success.”

Awesome Community

The community built up around AngularJS is just fantastically helpful. There are a plethora of blog posts covering everything one might want to know about application development with the framework. When I started working with it over 2 years ago, this was my first client-side web framework. I had a lot of questions. I was never left short of answers, with everything from how to handle token-based authentication, to how to write unit tests.

To the community: I miss you all, and I hope I can get some work building apps along with you again.

The AngularJS community kind of feels like the Coworking space I work out of here in Saint Catharines. No one is working specifically on the same project, but everyone provides support for one another anyway. They’re not actually pitching in on the work necessarily, but just being there and talking to each other makes us feel less alone.

If you have remote work available with AngularJS 1.x, I’d love to work with you. See my Hire Me page for more information. I’m willing to learn Angular 2.0 as well.