[Plone-conference] Food for thought on AngularJS and Plone

[Timo Stollenwerk]

Hi JC,

Angular 2.0 is much more a draft than a final implementation right now,
and the current discussion about it in the JS community (and the blog
post you mention) is not driven by people who are very professional in
my opinion. This is something that we have to live with (in the
Javascript community), but I don't think we should pick that up for our
discussions.

Angular is open source and currently the most widely used JS framework
out there. I don't buy the argument that we all will soon be stuck on
Angular 1.3 without any sane upgrade path. The core principles, even in
the draft that is currently discussed, will stay.

The blog post does not mention any positive aspect of Angular 2.0. For
instance, that its components will be much more reusable. This means,
that Angular's dependency injection system can be used separately.
Angular will most likely become much more of a library than a framework
then. Therefore, Angular 2.0 is more a pro argument than a con (in
regards to its possible adoption in Plone).

There are some good arguments against using Angular in Plone core
(something that nobody proposed yet, btw) and we carefully have to
evaluate all the options that we have before making any choice whatsoever.

I tried to show a balanced view in my talk at the conference why I think
Angular was a great fit for our specific use case. Laurence did
something similar in his React/JSON-LD talk.

I had very interesting and inspiring discussions during the conference
that gave me a much better overview about the pros and cons of the
different JS frameworks. I currently do not see a solution that just
provides us with everything that we need.

Please, start developing a pure-Javascript front-end for Plone in
Patternslib/Mockup/whatever JS framework you currently like most. Let's
build a sensible JSON API together and then start some competition
between the different approaches to find the best solution for Plone.

Cheers,
Timo

p.s.: I'm still looking forward to write my prototype in Angular (maybe
in Angular 2.0 ;))

Am 03.11.2014 um 11:41 schrieb JC Brand:
> Hi everyone
> 
> Firstly, thanks to Netsight and everyone who had a hand in organising and hosting such a wonderful conference.
> 
> There were some earnest discussions around the usage of Javascript frameworks with Plone and about bundling certain frameworks by default.
> 
> For those who still might believe that bundling AngularJS with Plone is a good idea, here is some food for thought.
> 
> The planned 2.0 release of Angular contains big backwards-incompatible changes in syntax and the reaction online has been strident,
> including this Hacker News discussion:
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8507632
> 
> and this article:
> http://blog.dantup.com/2014/10/have-the-angular-team-lost-their-marbles/
> 
> Additionally, Angular 1.3 will be supported for just 18-24 months after the
> release of 2.0.
> 
> Cheerio
> JC
> 
> (p.s. I got the links through the "Javascript weekly" newsletter)
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Timo Stollenwerk
web application developer

office +49 228 - 286 288 380
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