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Comment by marquis | Hacker News Reader

Yes! Not to hijack this thread but I hated building web interfaces with javascript, struggling with cross-browser support for anything remotely non-standard. We've been using Angular.js for the last month to build a very beautiful, complex interface and I'm loving every minute of it. As long as the framework doesn't change too drastically over time I know we'll be able to keep what we've built for its 2-3 year lifetime and fingers crossed that IE14 and Safari 7 don't break too much of it.

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Angular.js doesn't really solve the hard parts of writing web applications either. The hard part is structure. Not data binding. I don't need a framework to automatically update an <input> for me, input.value = val isn't costing me sleep at night.

What we need to make web applications easier are equivalents to things like UIPageViewController in iOS or Activities in Android. Real views that do real things. It seems that JS frameworks only give you the very top level base View class that does almost nothing.

I disagree. The hard part is nesting views/widgets, and these are very annoying to maintain manually.

Knockout.js provides a "foreach" binding, and Angular provides ng-repeat. These are good solutions that automatically handle nested-views in an efficient way.

Nesting views, along with data binding as MatthewPhillips pointed out, is not the hard part of developing frontend apps. Custom UI/UX is the hard part. Can angular fadeIn/slideDown your nested repeated/collection element? No. In angular, along with any other MV* framework, to handle this trivial UX, you have to write a special js routine (directive). Most apps will have much more custom UI/UX and you are going to have to write javascript, and you may have to fight your framework if it is too opinionated.

I think that these views are going to happen, especially as the Angular-UI project moves forward. The documentation of Angular needs a lot of work, but the fundamentals are sound and I think we might have a framework that genuinely gets us building apps instead of struggling with jquery.

Do you use CoffeeScript with Angular? I am curious if that combo works well.

Not at this stage but there are a lot of people using it successfully according to the comments on the (very active and informative) mailing list.

thanks. good to know

I do.

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