Angular 4.3 Now Available | Hacker News Reader

Angular 4.3 Now Available

angularjs.blogspot.com

37 pointsjanober42 comments

I know Angular is an easy framework to crap on for frontend developers, but I love Angular. Im a Python/Java developer and much prefer all inclusive frameworks like Django/Flask/Dropwizard over the micro frameworks like Flask/Spring that have great ecosystems but need to be pieced together. I realize I never use "Best in Breed" libraries and am usually forced to use whatever is built in but I don't mind because I get shit done. I really love the fact that I install Angular and BOOM I have everything I need to build an amazing application. Even better, with Angular CLI I can quickly bootstrap a frontend. If I use NGPrime, which is an open source component library, I can even quicker build an MVP. That combined with Django feels like super powers for building applications.

I'm in the same boat. I get that it's "cool" to crap on Angular here on HN, but I find it to be a great framework that you only need to learn by itself (unlike React where you also need 10 other things). Angular CLI makes it easy to get started and examples / help are easy to find.

To be fair, those '10 other things' are already baked into angular, so if you don't want them, well, too bad.

But you don't have to import something if you don't intend on using it. They're baked in conceptually, so there's more coherence, but the deployment payload doesn't have to be unnecessarily large.

I stand corrected. Looks as if things have changed from what I remember.

I code mostly in C#/.NET these days, Angular 2 made web development bearable for me and my colleagues.

I agree, C#/.NET + Angular + Typescript is a nice combination. I hope it will become even nicer when .NET Core will stabilize and rise in popularity.

I'm wildly confused by your comment, Dropwizard is 'all inclusive' but Spring is a micro-framework? Flask is both?

My takeaway is that somebody who is confused about library design is more likely to enjoy a heavy framework, but that their choice of framework is mostly arbitrary.

Spring is as micro as Java gets. Probably not a great example but its the best one I could think of at the time of the comment. Flask is a singular framework that has an ecosystem around it with plugins/extensions.

> Spring is as micro as Java gets.

Dropwizard was created as the minimalist counter point to Spring/EE.

I'm a Spring dev & ya its about as thick as it gets.

I know, reading HN makes me feel ashamed to admit my prefered web stack is Spring + Angular.

its just a matter of time before everyone starts crapping on (insert hottest framework). its a never ending vicious cycle.

Generational churn in the web front end framework space is a phenomenon deserving special examination.

Just 2-4 years ago, Angular skills were in high demand, only to be completely replaced by React & Co. I'm not complaining, much preferring React's model over Angular's decorator and type heavy one which is too Java/JEE-ish for my taste.

But what makes frontenders so confident they've found the holy grail at the height of a hype cycle every single time? Is it a sales story to better market one's skills? Is it a consequence of a young developer's mind trying to ascertain himself/herself and become part of a group of like-minded people?

Because rationality seems not always a given when it comes to web dev. I've seen React projects which, frankly, were trivial to make using just basic Javascript and DOM techniques, plus maybe some jquery. But the developers absolutely wanted to pad their resumes with React above everything else.

I think that it's always worth remembering the iceberg effect when we talk about trends: the silent majority of developers don't comment on HN or Reddit, don't answer questions on Stack Overflow, don't publish code on GitHub, and are using the same un-hip stacks year-on-year (Java, C#, PHP, maybe Rails, jQuery or Angular).

The C# developers that I have spoken to have used Angular for years, like TypeScript, and reach for Angular + TS by default, rather than React + ES6/7. Plenty of Rails developers stick with jQuery, maybe with some CoffeeScript: Rails only "modernized" their JS stack a few months ago.

The last StackOverflow survey showed a much greater dev mindshare for Angular than React, so I'm not sure where the grandparent gets "completely replaced by React & Co"... unless going by HN/Reddit memes/buzz.

There is no holy-grail. One cannot mask his ignorance of the DOM and web API with a front-end framework. Just like one cannot mask his ignorance of HTTP and REST with SPRING,ASP.NET,Django or Rails. you might know how to upload a file with Django API but if you can't do that with a barebone HTTP server then you'll be just another mediocre developer who only knows framework X or Y.

Angular and co, it's just like Spring and Co, it's bureaucracy. Some people like bureaucracy, because it make them look busy.

I don't understand why Google has to depreciate something so low level as http client in their frameworks.

I've already had enough mess with Android, now the trend comes to Angular. Even after a complete re-write of AngularJS, they still have to do this.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32153318/httpclient-wont...

I'm pretty bummed they removed /deep/ , which was a pretty damn useful feature for overriding library css. Guess I won't be upgrading to 4.3 now

Just another step in ensuring Angular will be the most overengineered frontend framework on the web sigh.

It hasn't been removed (as far as the changelog says), just deprecated, and with good reason. From the relevant commit message:

- /deep/ is deprecated [as a web standard] and being removed from Chrome

- >>> is semantically invalid in a stylesheet

- sass will no longer support either in any version of sass

That said, it seems that the immediate replacement (::ng-deep) is also deprecated? I get that the decision is mostly out of Angular's hands, but that sucks.

I like Angular 4 but I’ve been having a hard time finding people to take over an ng2 project. My guess is that in a year people will come around. mike(at)edition(dot)io if anyone is looking in the meantime.

Anyone using this? (Or I guess any angular > 1.x)

Angular4 is pretty awesome and I definitely vouch for it over 1.X. I Find 1.x pretty ugly and un-fun to write but 2/4 is pretty clean.

Where is Angular 3?

They had a router package in angular 2 which had 3 as it major version number. To sync all version numbers, they decided the next version would be 4.

http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/12/ok-let-me-explain-its-...

Where is Windows 9?

People are still using Angular, after version 2 was unexplicably incompatible with v.1..?

I don't understand the mentality behind "people are still using _____?" comments. What are you trying to communicate here?

I was just genuinely wondering if many people still use Angular, since I don't see it mentioned it that much anymore.

Where you say Angular, you can replace it by Python, Swift, ...

Angular 2 was seriously considered by my company. Having it named "2" was an unfortunate marketing error as in reality it is a new framework inspired by the old one. That shouldn't reflect poorly on the framework though.

It does reflect poorly on how they just drop the old one and said we're making something else now.

This is one of the reasons why I just gave up on web dev. It's to chaotic and messy. I've basically left this industry and let it sort itself out.

I thought maybe after 2-3 years it'll be good again. Recently did some neat data viz front end and wow it didn't get better at all. What the hell happen to harmony? There are shims and shams for es5 and es6... It's even more fragmented.

Did they really "just drop the old one"? Angular 2 was announced over 2 years ago, and initially was released 10 months ago.

Meanwhile, Angular 1 has continued to receive support this entire time, with the latest release 11 days ago and the latest merge to master being 4 days ago.

And, if you're on Angular 1 and want to upgrade, they've published an official migration guide.

No, they didn't. In fact, they just recently released 1.6.5, yet another in a stream of maintenance updates to the old-generation 1.x branch.

Technical rants are one of the reasons I enjoy reading this website, and lot of people here like to shit on Angular. But it seems to me the reasons aren't usually technical, they are more techno-political or ford-vs-chevy type arguments.

The term "over-engineered" is often thrown out there, and while that's a hard-to-quantify subjective judgement, it does kind of fit. There are many features in Angular, which do lots of things for you, but at the cost of added complexity and a steeper learning curve.

But one of the good aspects of being "over-engineered" is the incredibly long sunset window for Angular 1.x (the previous, and largely incompatible generation; 2.x onwards is "current generation").

Maintenance releases to 1.x keep coming out, some of which (1.5) add a bunch of new stuff that makes it easier to modernize your design even under the old framework, and to port your legacy 1.x code to modern Angular when the time comes.

Also, there's an well-documented upgrade path, and (importantly!) an officially supported library (ngUpgrade) that lets you make a gradual transition to modern angular, where your old code runs in Angular 1.x, new components run in modern Angular, ngUpgrade helps integrate the two worlds in a single app in the browser. So you can do a component-by-component migration of a production app over years.

As a native app developer (and not a fan of JavaScript) who nevertheless last year joined a team that also has to maintain an old, in-production, customer-facing Angular 1.x app, I really like all these "over-engineered" features.

That's not to say I love every single thing about Angular but I think a.) it's pretty good, b.) modern version is better than the old one and going in the right direction, and c.) lots of the complaints are more like "they fucked up the upgrade process from 1.x" (they did) or "Google sux brah" (whatever).

ngUpgrade is kind of a joke in practice. Most 1 to 4 migrations end up being total rewrites.

Interesting. Is that first-hand experience? If so, what are some of the issues?

Yes. We built out a lot of NG1 components at my company and are currently building a product in NG4. The issues are, for example, the template syntax is completely different. That has to be mapped over. There is no $scope and the component lifecycle is completely different in NG4. Depending on how you stored state, responded to state, and depending on which ngDirectives you used...there may or may not be a direct mapping with concepts for NG4. Also, if you have any testing in place at all, those tests will likely need to be rewritten.

NG4 components depend on RxJS, for example...but Angular 1 had no such concept. SystemJS modules are a thing in Angular 4...but not in Angular 1. You may or may not have ES6 modules in your Angular 1 code base...but you definitely have them in your Angular 4 code base. There are so many differences that "upgrading" to Angular 4 is really just a rewrite in practice. And it's no less effort for you to migrate to React or Vue in a piecewise manner.

Well it is necessary to put in place a build pipeline for developing a web app, but I don't see that as too much of a burden. If your app is of sufficient complexity to warrant using angular or whatever then you will be pouring hundreds of hours into it anyways, what's a dozen hours up front to learn how to properly use webpack to bundle and transpile your code so it will work in all browsers?

Where did you move to? I see mostly web dev jobs right now everything else is too specialized and hard to break into.

No. Nobody uses it after the un-backwards-conpatibility scandal of '14. People are in limbo searching for the next angular but, alas, it cannot be found.

Do you have any suggestions, your holiness?

Well, I'm just saying that if they've done it once—and when their framework was at its peak—they might do it again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com