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Comment by ryanisinallofus | Hacker News Reader

"JavaScript version of Drupal"

Ouch, but accurate.

Wow, this could not be further from the truth. Angular is much more similar to Rails than Drupal. Like Rails, it magically takes care of some of the more routine and annoying parts of front-end development like DOM manipulation and testing, but beyond that you're just writing javascript without having to worry about making sure your views are being updated. To extend the analogy I would compare Backbone to Sinatra. It's much smaller, allows the developer to make more choices, but takes care of less details.

So if you prefer Sinatra over Rails, you'll probably prefer Backbone over Angular or Ember. If you like all the magic Rails has to offer, you're probably going to feel right at home with Angular. But comparing Angular to Drupal is ridiculous.

Ember is to Rails is accurate but there isn't much like Angular in server side land. Maybe Plone?

Actually, I would compare AngularJS to Node's Express or Ruby's Sinatra. Because by and large it's actually a set of highly reusable and composable blocks that make very few assumptions about what you're trying to do (aside from something vaguely DOM related). It's a fairly pure look at the MVVM metaphor and does not even assume you're trying to do CRUD or RPC or whatever. Heck, you're not even tied to using client-side routing.

Please don't compare it to Express. Express is a beautifully simple, and clean framework that strives to always have the least magic possible. You can see that goal reflected in the simplicity of its documentation as well. You can build on top of it with any other node modules you want exactly because it doesn't make strict assumptions about your code. If you were to compare Express to any front-end framework it would be Backbone.

Angular is not simple in any since of the word. (Especially if we're talking about its documentation.) And it's components are only reusable inside the Angular bubble.

Plus isn't express server side anyways?

I really don't think it's accurate at all. Can you qualify it in any way?

For me, Drupal sucks for developers because you're configuring a bunch of objects to try to build a system but you're a) at the mercy of the initial design and b) going to run into hook soup hell, especially once a couple of plugins are installed.

Angular is nothing like that. You have a few classes of things you'll create. They're all well thought our and have very specific uses. None of them constrain you in any way, all the code inside is yours.

I don't get the comparison. I would never touch Drupal again however you would have to produce a very convincing argument to move me off Angular.

Ugh. I remember being in love with Drupal, before the betrayals, the lies and the abuse. I need a bath.

This just put me off AngularJS

Give it a try - that comparison is pretty bad IMO.

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