I Was Afraid of Angular.js Because it Reminded me of Drupal
daemon.co.za
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IMHO Angular is overly complicated once you try to dig in, for example to make your own HTML elements.
Building custom elements with Web Components/Polymer is the next step, along with promoting web components/polymer and working on getting compatibility in user's browsers.
People say its not ready for mainstream, which is true. _However_, if we all start taking Polymer/Web Components seriously, pretty quickly it _will_ be ready, i.e. it will work in new releases of Firefox, Chrome and probably Safari. And even IE 10 and 11. We just need people to start seriously trying to take advantage of it, patching things and pushing for compatibility/stability/adoption.
And someone might say something like "I think you are confused about what Angular and Web Components do.. blah Angular is going to take advantage of Web Components in the near future". So let me save you the lecture.
I have used Angular in 3 or 4 projects. I know what it does. I know it is going to use Web Components in the future.
But like I said, its too complicated. And most, if not all, of the things that you would do with Angular with/without using custom elements, you can take advantage of Polymer/Web Components features to do. And it will be much simpler to code and maintain, and not particular to any overall framework.
So as far as I'm concerned Angular is superfluous at this point, and a liability, if I am not constrained by immediately shitty browser realities.
If there is something that Angular does that can't be implemented with Web Components/Polymer, please let me know.
Not soon though, that is up to browser makers.
Angular is close enough tot he general idea though, that I think it's proving the approach is valid to an entire generation of devs. Devs who would never have known about web components if angular wasn't legitimising it.
[1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Gv-dvU-yy6WY7SiNJ9QR...
What is left for Angular to do? Really would like to know the answer to that.
If they are serious about helping move the web forward, they will just change the Angular logo to the Polymer logo and start pushing to make that work. And stop saying things like browsers aren't ready.
Polymer works in new versions of Firefox, Chrome and IE. We don't need a new version of Angular.
If someone thinks we need to keep using Angular, give me a reason. That presentation on Google Docs that is linked in the parent just shows reasons for Angular to go away.
you need to be patient. open platforms are a very long term play.
i saw they reviewed a few of the polyfills for 2.0 inclusion, and there wasn't a lot that was really capable of being used yet, for a variety of reason.
I believe open platforms will win eventually, but it's not going to be tomorrow. it will be maybe 5-10 years from now. Just be glad there's movement.
I am looking at next year or maybe the year after that to see a massive surge in popularity and use of Polymer.
> i was wrong to be afraid of angular.js
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7384937
> Why I was Wrong to be afraid of Angular.js
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7394959
> Complexity Creeps: Why I'm Concerned for the Future of Angular
> Simple and easy, a vocabulary for describing software complexity
http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/simple-and-easy-vocabulary-to-de...
> How complexity affects your software
Let's see what the spectrum of PHP solutions is. It goes from:
- WordPress: very simple, you don't need to be a coder, not that powerful.
And goes until:
- PHP + libraries: complicated, you need to be a coder, extremely powerful.
And here's Drupal:
- Drupal: a lot more more complicated than WordPress, not that much less complicated than plain PHP, yet much less powerful than plain PHP.
In a nutshell, Drupal and apps like it want to be everything to everyone, and that's how bad apps happen.
WordPress may suck, but it has focus, and people with simple needs like the proposition.
Wordpress maintainers just dont bother...because obsessed with backward compat.
Drupal is in my opinion (oddly) easier to maintain for non coders,CCK an Views, no need for any PHP skill to create new content types or write queries in Drupal.
With Wordpress,you need to code if you want to extend anything.
My problem with both is that the plugins are written in PHP.A good CMS would have at least one plugin layer which would rely on manifests(xml,json...) rather than code(just like angular),or at least have a sandbox system with permissions,some kind of inverted oauth system (eg:"this plugin wants to be able to write to your db,write to your file system,access this or that resource...")
To say it's less powerful than "plain PHP" is just wrong, since via custom modules, which you'll be writing at least a half dozen of for a real non-trivial (e.g. the kind of thing you wouldn't just do in WP, just you can essentially just sprinkle in 100% custom "plain PHP" whereever you need it, while still being able to leverage things Drupal does right, like form handling and batch operations.
I ultimately found that I was happier writing stuff closer to the way wordpress does it.
It really comes down to two things
1. depending on what tools you have available, what you are familiar with or what you are capable of understanding .. drupal or wordpress might be easier for you than the other. That's relative.
2. is the fact that the wordpress model is objectively simpler than the drupal model (at least last time I looked, around 4 years ago).
So I'm not saying one is better than the other at all, just that this is how they are different.
If you know, or are willing to learn, a bit of code, wordpress is most likely subjectively easier than drupal would be.
We actually didn't use Drupal forms for much on the front end (The occasional webform for user submissions, etc, but very few actual drupal api forms), but on the admin backend we had lots of little things I threw together that worked well but were not used all the frequently (and then only by power users).
Our frontend was primarily done through a system I called the Page module (Because it was the module that made...the pages - for instance http://www.reflector.com/news). That was actually a really cool hack. It worked a lot like views - but could actually run on a high traffic site without bringing the whole thing to it's knees. The trick was that the really nasty join across about 8 tables (node, the content type data, related image data, story body (for teasers), and a couple others) was done only on node save and that was stored in an index table (not everything on the node, but just what I needed to build a page). So to generate each news block was a really super simple query of basically:
select * from page_index where page_blockid = 12345
order by updated desc limit 5
instead of something like, and this is the super simplfied version
select * from node left join content_type_story cts
on cts.nid = node.nid left join taxonomy_data td on
td.nid = node.nid left join uploads on uploads.nid = node.nid
left join upload_files uf on uf.uid = uploads.uid
left join node_content nc on nc.vid = node.vid
where (td.termid = 1231 or td.termid = 1256) and
node.published = 1 order by updated desc limit 5
Of course, we were running multidomain so a lot of those tables where domain alises etc, again, all precomputed in my module.
No, I don't miss it. But it was powerful, and I did develop, deploy, and serve 3 daily newspapers with 20k+ circ each with a dev and sysadmin staff of 1. There is no way I could have done that if I'd had to write everything from scratch.
To put it another way: the fact that you can greenspun Lisp in C doesn't mean C has all the power of Lisp. It means that Lisp has all the power of Lisp. Every even-mildly-useful language is Turing-complete; so, in order to be able to give a ranking to languages at all, we have to restrict our discussion of a language's merits to its merits if you aren't just using it as a glorified Turing machine for implementing a different language.
Without writing custom PHP, Drupal is less powerful than PHP. That's perfectly okay.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner-platform_effect
DSL's are generally not turing complete. When they are, they tend to look more like lisp.
Also, Drupal is NOT a DSL, even in the way, say, Rails is.
drupal uses an apache config hack to rewrite the urls.
I'm _intimately_ familiar with the feature. That feature came in with Drupal 4.2.0 back in december of 2001, which was the second Drupal release I deployed a site on. It was also the first Drupal release to include any of my own code.
https://drupal.org/drupal-4.2.0
Back in the day the only way to get anything committed was to roll a patch and commit it to a special cvs repository, manually numbering it. then you had to mail the dev list with the name of the patch so you could discuss it, and then if it still applied dries committed it.
I tried finding the mails on gmane, but the repo itself and the emails seem to cut out before.
So while q?= was considered an acceptable fallback, and it was still cleaner than what we had before ... this feature has always explicitly been about supporting url rewrites.
This is me : https://drupal.org/user/1337
When I built bryght.com, my first startup in 2004, trying to be the wordpress.com of drupal, before wordpress.com was a thing : I had to make sure this worked with it.
When I wrote Aegir, a distributed turn-key automated hosting platform for Drupal sites, I had to write the logic that made sure this stuff worked. I did that for apache, and with some help from omega8.cc, nginx.
Please don't try to act like you're an expert on what 'design patterns' we were implementing when we did that, because I'm telling your straight out now, that wasn't why we did it.
I spent 9+ years of my life building major components of the system, and I'm still really proud of all of it. Millions of people all over the world run the software I helped build.
For one, Apache isn't even what I'd recommend to use for serving Drupal - at my last job we were serving 50M reqs/monthly via nginx and it worked very well.
Drupal implements the front controller pattern...it has nothing to do with URL rewriting.
It is true that if you want "pretty" URLs on Apache you need to use rewrites, but I think it is a cheap shot to characterize using a core feature as it was intended as a "hack".
The original assertion was that Z was more powerful than X, and I merely stated that that is false because X is really the superset X+Z, whereas if you are using JUST Z you don't get X.
We're not talking about 2 different languages here.
4.7 and 5.x (the first versions I used) didn't have many nice themes or a particularly friendly interface for content creators, which Wordpress had and won. But the Drupal community weren't much into making simple sites (though they could be made).
Drupal has always struck me as a CMS for non-coders to create something quite complex, and when scaling something for a coder to pick up and adapt as they need, with a lot of stuff built-in. And it has definitely won on that front, with perhaps the most comparable system being Django, but even then Drupal is more Swiss Army Knife like: It can't open a tin of beans perfectly, but it can do it quickly, and a few hours in the tool-shop improve it a lot. Likewise it can cut down a tree (if painfully), cut your fabric and has a neat nose-pick built-in.
Numerous media, government and commerce sites use it. It is quite adaptable, gets the 90% done quickly (yes, the learning curve is greater than Wordpress, but a lot more is happening), and allows anyone with some PHP and CSS expertise get the remaining 10% done reasonably well.
my recommendation was that they remove it from core, and have it be opt-in through the use of ngmin.
they are actually removing it completely from angular 2.0, so it's a moot point really.
http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/complexity-creeps-concerned-for-...
I also stated that I was fine with the dirty checking, because it worked better than it had any real right to. And best of all, it's only 'for now'
I too felt the exact same way when looking at AngularJS. It seemed as though I could spend a year learning/perfecting my skills with it... only to be let down in the end.
i've seen how stuff changes over time, it makes me aware of this stuff.
Drupal wasn't always that complex either. I think i'm probably culpable. I identified the point where I complected Drupal and set it on this direction, but that's another article for another time.
I think Drupal is a relic of the past when monolithic frameworks rather than the microframeworks ruled the day, I agree the same thing is happening in javascript world. The smaller/component/message based libraries win out after people know how to do things. In the beginning monolithic helps people make the jump, but quickly become too all encompassing to the point it hides what you need to know (asp.net's famous fail).
Who knows, drupal might have started off clean but when you are an overarching monolithic framework that becomes the go to for marketing/bizdev technology decisions then it bloats to EOL. You won't find a happy developer in Drupal-land but you'll find lots of marketing/bizdev peeps that think they are working out the need for a developer by using the standard bloated CMS of the day. Angular is still on the developer front, but if it gets big enough and it is monolithic then it is a problem.
Drupal could be worse though, it could be Joomla, both flawed monolithic platforms from the PHPNuke evolution tree. That fad ended in 2007.
I would really like to see that article. Because, I too have been involved in such things, several times, but have not managed to identify exactly where we went wrong (or even convince others that we were going wrong :) ). I think figuring out how to avoid that kind of complexity is one of they key challenges of certain kinds of software these days.
(For instance, some people think Rails has already jumped that shark, some people don't, but I'm not sure even the people who think it has become complectified all agree on when it happened and how it could have been avoided. When I see people starting something new that's supposed to be "like Rails, but without all that needless complexity", I just think, sure, Rails started out simpler than today's Rails too, and you'll end up in the same place (or worse) unless you can come up with an understanding of what went wrong other than "Those other people made bad decisions I would never have made because I'm a better coder", nope, that's not what happened.).
I took so long to get the fourth in this series finished because i needed to get the necessary theory out there first.
http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/simple-and-easy-vocabulary-to-de...
I still think actual concrete examples from real world projects would be great. (Maybe the presentation has some).
(That's what I initially thought the 'Beautiful Code' book would be about, but it looked like more about algorithmic cleverness than success in architecting simplicity. Which is good too, but many of us spend a lot more time struggling with the challenges of architecting simplicity)
i was just so busy watching where I stepped, that I never stopped to think if I would like where we were going.