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Comment by jonny_eh | Hacker News Reader

When deciding on which open-source tool to use, it's often important to look at the popularity of the various choices.

Take a look at the Google Trends for the leading contenders: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=angularjs%2C%20emberj...

It's mind-boggling how much farther ahead angular is. Then again, angular is pretty awesome and have been a big fan for over a year now.

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I prefer looking at the projects being built with each library:

Ember: http://emberjs.com/ember-users/

Angular: http://builtwith.angularjs.org/

Aside from Square and Groupon, nobody big is building any complex apps around either of these technologies. The question has been and remains: if ember and angular are so great, where are the real use cases?

They're still pretty young, tbh. Most major web companies will probably stick with their existing frameworks, which they are pretty comfortable with by now. Future websites might portray the popularity more accurately.

http://blog.angularjs.org/2012/06/doubleclick-super-powered-...

I've used Angular for five weeks and ractive for five months.

I Googled about 30x more frequently when using Angular.

Nailed it - Angular is horrible IMO. Takes SOOO long to relearn everything then you find some of the inbuilt tags just don't work on mobile or responsively and are difficult to extend. The debugging is a joke too.

I think a better way of comparing the popularity of dev tools is to search for them at GitHub and compare the results:

https://github.com/search?q=Angular&type=Repositories&s=star...

https://github.com/search?q=Ember&type=Repositories&s=stars

Angular is developed by Google and has several developer-celebrities evangelizing it on the web daily, speaking at conferences ever other week, etc. It would be shocking if Angular weren't the most popular framework.

That's because poor Angular documentation. People start googling like crazy to find what they need.

Agree.

Interesting point. And projects like Django probably not very 'popular' because of good documentation.

Agree. What set apart a project from another is the quality and amount of documentation, also tutorials, articles, books and reviews(it help a lot on the popularity context).

Brilliant point; it's not just that the docs are poor, inherently the framework is so obscure that you need to either be an Angular savant or constantly Googling only to find half the inbuilt functionality cannot be made responsive!

And yet GWT never caught on like this. Just because Google's backing a project it does not guarantee success.

are you kidding? GWT is heavily used in the enterprise world. A lot of java developpers just dont want to touch javascript code.

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=backbone%2C%20ember%2...

None of the search terms ember, angular or backbone mean only the javascript framework, therefore your results are most likely skewed.

His are even more skewed, most people don't search for the terms as he's using them. There's also stuff like "backbone js". The only thing I'm proving is that the search trends are really really bad indicator.

With '.js' : http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=backbone.js%2C%20angu...

With 'js': http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=backbone%20js%2C%20an...

Search trends do indeed, suck.

For some perspective, I added node.js and removed flightjs (not sure what it is)

http://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=angularjs,+extjs,+emb...

As for arguments that popularity doesn't matter, well transferable skills do matter and ecosystems and communities do.

Flight.js is a microframework by Twitter based on DOM eventing - it requires jQuery and Require.js to use it.

The numbers are so small it's hard to draw real conclusions. Outside of hiring new devs with an existing skillset, what's the importance of looking at popularity?

(edit: good responses, thank you)

If you're going to have a dependency on a framework, it's nice to have it be actively developed so that you benefit from bug fixes and performance improvements (not to mention community developed framework plugins, extensions or libraries).

A framework gains value from its ecosystem of support. A big advantage of nodejs is all the packages available on npm. With Angular, a big advantage are all the great third-party directives and services (i.e. plugins).

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