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Comment by Tyrannosaurs | Hacker News Reader

This is a discussion playing out in our development team at the moment.

The one thing we've observed that he touches on in mentioning that Angular is backed by Google but doesn't really go into as much as he might, is that it feels like Angular has more momentum generally in the developer community - more posts on StackOverflow and more Git activity, plus more job ads.

If you're in it for the long haul that may be a significant factor.

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> The one thing we've observed that he touches on in mentioning that Angular is backed by Google but doesn't really go into as much as he might, is that it feels like Angular has more momentum generally in the developer community - more posts on StackOverflow and more Git activity, plus more job ads.

This is true, however:

- Angular is considered by both it's supporters and detractors to be very complex and it's documentation a little difficult. I've used Angular for some older production projects, and used ractive.js about 5x more newer projects, and I've searched/asked more questions for Angular.

- A lot of people think Google, rather than Getangular LLC, created Angular. I've also met a lot of people who think Angular is popular inside Google, or that Angular is used for Google+, both of which are incorrect.

The fact Ember is so popular despite the 'by Google' misconception around Angular actually makes me quite confident about Ember.

My Ember knowledge, BTW is limited, I went angular -> ractive.js, so there may be ember downsides I'm not aware of. Ember's new htmlbars templating looks really clean though, so I'm pretty excited to try ember once it's the default.

My personal view is the supported by Google isn't as robust a defence as some would like to believe - after all, it's not as if they don't have a history of dropping things with little or no warning.

It seems kind of a weak point it me, in way. The fact that Ember is around kinds speaks that it is quite good -- it didn't need a full time corporate backer to rise up.

I didn't get the impression that Angular was unpopular inside of Google from the talks from Google employees at Ng-Conf earlier this year. It's in use by the doubleclick team, they mentioned a ton of internal app usage, and they pointed to it being "the future" for current apps implemented against GWT. Also mentioned a lot of dart & angular dart usage as well.

Ask the Google employees at JSConf what they think, and you may hear a different story. :^)

Angular _was_ created at Google, by Misko Hevery and Brad Green.

No, it was created in 2009 at Brat Tech LLC by Miško Hevery and Adam Abrons, see any of the references in the other answer above.

"A lot of people think Google, rather than Getangular LLC, created Angular"

1. The Angular website itself states that Angular is "by Google"

2. On many occasions, Misko Hevery has described how he created Angular while working at Google.

3. This page itself is the only real reference to Getangular LLC that shows up in Google search results.

Consequently, I'm inclined to think that you're mixing up your story.

1. Angular is maintained by Google, but it was not created there.

2. Getangular was an online JSON storage service where Misko worked. AngularJS was announced on getangular.com (which was a product, not a project), and copyrighted Angular / BRAT Tech. LLC.

getangular's website: http://web.archive.org/web/20100413141437/http://getangular....

http://misko.hevery.com/2009/09/28/hello-world-angular-is-he... (original angularjs announcement, which mentions getangular.com)

You might also want to check out this early reviews of getangular's product: http://www.niden.net/2009/12/world-with-part-1-reviewhow-to....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AngularJS#Development_history

Or just ask Misko, Brian or any of the other Angular developers.

3. Search for 'Angular / BRAT Tech. LLC' for additional references

At the company I work for we recently did a massive migration from Backbone to Ember. The reasoning behind this was simple: prior to the funding round we had recently received that led to an influx of new developers, we had one senior FE guy who was customizing and building this all himself. It became a decision of convention the senior's way vs convention in the standard means of how it is defined in a framework. This is why Ember was so attractive: it is both powerful and maintains a rails-like standard on how you build an application up and out. On a personal project, I would totally use Angular or Backbone, but when maintainability is a question the convention of Ember is a clear winner in my eyes.

We are having the same discussions, and a lot of the developers seem to lean towards angular, simply because of that momentum that you mentioned.

> "The project I'm working on at Netflix is extremely ambitious, ... solving pretty interesting problems in Ember, that are actually a lot more complicated than problems I solved in previous Angular projects"

This is a key point that I keep running into. It seems that more complicated applications can benefit from Ember's very opinionated nature and more backbone-like structure...

I could be totally off base, as I've not created a large-scale app in either of these frameworks (yet).

We have a very complex Ember app, the discussion we have is largely around whether we've made the right choice.

My personal view is that we could get rid of every single problem we have with Ember if we replaced it with Angular... And instead have a whole new set of Angular problems.

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