I know that polymer is primarily used to create reusable elements, and angular is supposed to be used to create web apps (at least from a "high level" perspective), but I wonder, since you can wrap your own "Screens" as polymer elements, which actually could serve as controllers too, and switch the active page with the iron-pages element (see SPA demo), and you can also use more-routing well... instead of "routing by code", it supports one/two way binding and events, I've actually done some small SPA app like that myself, and so far so good actually! moving on-
Assuming I don't care about having some built-in REST wrapper such as the one provided by Angular (Easy to roll up my own if I use Dart), then in Dart's case:
Could polymer actually be used to create full apps?
Would it have any implications in performance if my whole app is in polymer? by that I mean, every screen is really an element, and so on.
Development speed, maintainability, and experience? (considering the fact that I use Dart which helps a lot in these areas)
Overall, is it a good idea? I'd like to know your opinions.
Any companies/indie devs have done this before? not necessarily with Dart, but with TypeScript/JS as well, although I'm 100% set on Dart.
I think Polymer is quite a good fit for that. I wouldn't necessarily go for "a Polymer element per page" but that might depend on the kind of application you are going to build. Especially in Dart Polymer it's a good start to make the root Element a Polymer element. You can for example keep the navigation and switch only a part of the view instead of the entire page (but that might be what you had in mind anyway)
You can also use dependency injection, which is a strong point of Angular.
The dirty checking might be better in Angular 2 but Angular isn't released yet and Polymer also has plans to improve here.
Related
The application under test is built on angular because of which the xpaths are failing to locate the element . I am using selenium web diver for automating the tests and google chrome browser.
Can anybody kindly specify how to break down angularjs components to basic html elements while creating the xpath or any other way i can adapt to find the exact element on the page.
Any link or path or tips to follow.
I have searched a lot but no luck till now.
Starting with covering some general concerns.
When testing AngularJS applications, the timing issues are usually the most common - this is partially why we have tools like Protractor built mainly to test AngularJS applications. What makes it unique is that it works in sync with Angular, knowing when it is ready to be interacted with. It also provide AngularJS specific locators which makes locating elements much easier, samples:
element.all(by.repeater("item in items"));
element(by.binding("mybinding"));
element(by.model("mymodel"));
If you can, you should consider switching to Protractor - the test flow is natural - almost no explicit waits, a lot of convenient syntactic sugar and much more element-locating options.
If not, you can still use Angular-specific attributes to locate elements, examples:
driver.findElements(By.xpath("//*[#ng-repeat='item in items']"));
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[#ng-binding='mybinding']"));
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//*[#ng-model='mymodel']"));
Though, as usual, you should prefer to use ids, classes and other "data-oriented" attributes.
Things can easily go wrong with the above sample expressions - imagine web developers add a "tracking" to the repeater, or rename the ng-repeater to data-ng-repeater.
As a side note, using Angular specific things like ng-* attributes in your tests, would make the test codebase tight to this specific technology used to build the application under test. It is not necessarily a bad thing but you should keep it in mind.
I'm working on a project which has the luxury of using ECMA 6 on the latest browsers for a product that will be shipped in 1.5 years. So we thought why not use Web Components now that Angular 2 isn't available (which is going to be ECMA 6). And while we are at it, can we replace Angular altogether without having to go back to stone age?
How to replace Angular?
There's this site called youmightnotneedjquery.com which is basically about how modern browsers actually have most of the stuff that jQuery was traditionally used for. I'm interested to see something like that for Angular.
We mainly use four Angular features. What are my options for replacing them?
Angular Directives --> Web Components
Angular Modules --> ECMA 6 Modules (not exactly the same thing)
Angular Routes --> ???
Angular 2-way databinding --> ???
PS. We don't want to replace Angular with something similar like Backbone or Ember. We want to replace it with standard web technologies but if we have to use small tools to fill the gap, we'll consider it.
I've been researching in the past 3 weeks and turns out many people are thinking about an alternative after Angular took a drastic change path. Fortunately the upcomming W3C Web Components standard actually has all we need and it works right now with polyfills from the Polymer project. So to answer the question:
Angular Directives --> Web Components use the polyfill until all browsers support it.
Angular Modules --> ECMA 6 Modules part of the problem is solved with HTML imports. But you can also use Traceur until the browsers support it.
Angular Routes --> There's a component for that™ use <app-router>.
Angular 2-way databinding --> Polymer adds a "magic" layer on top of the plain standard web components. This includes many features including data-binding.
+Plus More
If you're wondering about the build process for concatenating files in order to reduce the number of HTTP requests, take a look at Addy Osmani's post about Vulcanize. Spoiler: you may not need it with the upcoming HTTP 2 optimizations.
Many Angular projects use Twitter Bootstrap for the layout. Polymer can do that plus it plays nicely with Google's Paper elements (totally optional but superbly awesome).
If you want to make yourself familiar with web components in general, here is a bunch of nice articles: http://webcomponents.org/articles/
And here is a wealth of web components: http://customelements.io/ I don't know if it's going to be a new NPM, but the list components is pretty impressive and growing.
It's relatively complicated to expose an API for an Angular component. People have come up with all sorts of methods from link function to emitting events. In Web Components, however, it's really easy to make your component interact with the world outside and indeed the API and events you expose aren't much different from standard HTML tags like <audio>.
Just like Angular, you can use Polymer with Dart as well.
Conclusion
Overall, I don't see any reason to use Angular except if:
You have a huge source code investment in angular and don't want to port everything to standard web. (Angular 2.0 will deprecate your code anyway, so you're stuck with Angular 1.*)
Your team is too lazy to learn a new technology (in that case web might not be the right platform for this attitude anyway).
Angular was good for what it was doing and had its own Hype cycle. Web components solve many of the issues Angular was trying to address. Probably Angular had a role as a proof of concept for the Web components. But now it's time to move on. Web is reinventing itself everyday and it's inevitable to moves someone's cheese.
I'm not saying that Polymer is the ultimate answer to everything. At best it's another Angular which will render useless in a couple of years, but now it's a good time to learn and use it. The W3C standards don't die easily though, and Polymer tends to be much closer to them.
There's an element for that™ is the new There's an app for that™
TLDR: seriously consider writing an almost Angular 2.0-compatable Angular 1.3 app before rolling your own framework
It seems as if you've identified that Angular does a lot of things the right way and that's why you're attempting to replicate it, so basically you're going to roll your own by combining a hodgepodge of libraries. Unless you have an enormous investment of Engineering hours, the framework you build will likely be:
Lightly documented
A cross-browser maintenance nightmare and (worst of all)
Difficult for new hires to learn
If there wasn't a framework out there that did what you want to do already, I think rolling your own makes sense, but by trying to recreate Angular you're:
Taking on a lot of Engineering work that has already been done by a dedicated team, that could have been spent on building product
Made it MUCH more difficult to onboard new employees because you have to:
Find candidates that are willing to use a home-grown framework instead of growing their skills at an open source framework they could use elsewhere
Train these employees to use your framework (and good luck unless your documentation is mature)
I know your question asks how to replace Angular, but I've seen too many companies go the route of rolling their own and paying for it down the road. Again, if your budget includes a ton of core resources to build out (and document, and maintain) the framework and you don't think there is any chance corners will get cut when push comes to shove later if timelines get tight, then rolling your own might make sense. However, I think you should seriously consider reading up on how to write Angular 1.3 apps so that they're easy to port to Angular 2.0 and go the Angular route. Just look at the size of the community you're missing out on:
http://www.airpair.com/js/javascript-framework-comparison
I start learning recently polymer.
I want to hear yours opinion if its make sense to use both frameworks polymer and angular together or not and if polymer is really ready for production and what is your choice?
Polymer and Angular Together
Yes, of-course they both can be used independently as well as together. Actually they both are two different things and to serve two different purposes, Though they have some common features to offer.
Please refer to this answer for a detailed explanation. It covers more things and tells about how Polymer & Angular both can be used as part of the same project.
Polymer for Production
With the release of Polymer 1.0, they claim it to be the production ready and as per them they have focussed more on the speed and efficiency this time. As a major change of this release they have replaced the shadow dom with shady dom.
Finger Crossed, I am also intending to use it in my project. Though I have heard very little of it being used in Production by others.
I think Yes, is not a bad choice ! For example i try to use Angular for the little bit complex Service like the Auth Token Authentication, and Polymer for the others ! I want to use Material Design and the right choice is Polymer throught the Paper Element, i tried ngMaterial but is not so good like the Material in Polymer .... so my Answer for the Moment is Yes !
Does it make sense having a solution that uses both Freemarker and AngularJS?
I tried to convince everyone on my team of switching to Angular, and a more experienced developer than me pointed out that he prefers server-side rendering, which is both arguable and valid. But then he told me that if I still want to use Angular just use it with Freemarker instead of replacing it.
I'm a junior programmer, as far as I can understand they are designed to the same purpose.
It depends on the needs.
For example, if you want to break your page into individual re-usable components that you can tie based on some logic on the server side, then using freemarker or velocity for building these components makes sense.
The freemarker or velocity templates might in-turn use angularJS components that would be rendered on the browser and evaluated on the client side.
The server side templating would give you the ability to design re-usable angular components.
Now, some may try to use the Object component in HTML5 for doing the same thing, but this is not recommended as using Object expects a fully formed HTML element with its own <html> opening and closing tag.
Not something that is intended for a small reusable component.
As an example consider having your page header and footer in its own html template file that you would like to tie in for all the pages in your application.
As I google for Freemarker i realize it is just a templating engine. AngularJS is not a templating engine. Templating engine is just part within this framework. So both of them cannot be compared.
AngularJS is a full fledged framework for creating Single Page Applications (SPA). So if you want just templating capabilities on client side, i suggest you better look for some other light weight libraries.
If you want to use AngularJS you need to decide
Whether you can structure your app as a SPA
Does the site needs to be SEO optimized. Which has limited support in Angular or as a matter of fact in any client side framework.
Ready to use the AngularJS templating engine because it is awesome with its support for oneway\two way active bindings. If you don't use it templating engine you are loosing a lot.
No it clearly does not make sense as they serve very different purposes. All I can think of is that you either misunderstood the more experienced developer or he really has not understood the business case (WHY something is worth using) of using either technology. In my experience as a j2ee developer, I find that many server side developers (experienced or not) may not be too educated on the many new advances recently made in client side development. With Angular you are not limited to SPA. You need an insight into the overall architecture of your current project to determine if its a good fit. There are ways around the SEO issues or you can purchase an SEO solution. But clearly not a best choice if SEO is essential.
Unless it is a team decision and there are clear problems Angular solves for you, I would not suggest getting stuck alone with a new technology that only you know. Keep it as a hobby and when you really understand the best practices and benefits you can then try being an evangelist.
I'm wondering if anyone has found a solution to this problem. Is there a way to get the best of both worlds:
build a page-based site, with permanent links, accessibility, SEO, and graceful fallback / progressive enhancement (basically all the best practices of web development)
and, for those with javascript, a responsive front-end experience with ajax loading of content, no page refreshes while navigating the underlying site pages, minimal redundant downloading of scripts/content/css/etc. (all the benefits of a client-side framework like AngularJs or Ember.js)
I see a few major sites are able to manage this (gmail, stackoverflow), and I see that Jeff's new site builds a bare-bones version of the site in a noscript tag.
Is the solution to the hybrid page-based/single-page app to build two versions of the site, send both, and let the client decide which it can show? (is this what gmail does?)
Or is the problem that AngularJS et al. are simply not designed to allow for graceful degradation?
It hurts my DRY brains to think that #1 is the answer.
(The reason I am focusing on AngularJs is that I like its support for html templating, declarative style, and its attempts to fix js scoping. Ember and other frameworks are excellent too; maybe one of them would be a better fit for a hybrid site?)
This questions is a bit of a nuanced one because the answer is "it depends". For example you mentioned Gmail, there isn't any reasons whatsoever that an application like Gmail would need to be indexed for SEO, though depending on what you want or need to support you may want to ensure you can support not having Javascript.
However even the "no-javascript" argument is getting tired and weak these days, at least for the class of "web applications". If I want to use a Windows application I need Windows, if I want to use a javascript powered web application it isn't unreasonable to assume that I'm going to need a browser that isn't crippled to use it.
However back to your question I can only speak to AngularJS because I'm the most familiar with it. For the most part it does allow you to support a progressive enhancement approach, though don't expect to use things like URL routing if this is what you want to support. What you can do is use AngularJS controllers, bindings and directives similar to how you might use jQuery as a way of enhancing the interactions and behaviours of the page.
Just keep in mind this approach will seriously limit what you can do with Angular (or Ember for that matter) and it may start to be debatable what you are getting from this approach that you couldn't easily do with jQuery alone.
The alternative these days is to do what sites like Twitter are doing. That is basically serve fully rendered HTML from the server for any view on the initial load and then use Javascript for subsequent loading and enhanced UI behaviour. This is very effective (though perhaps quite challenging to implement) if you really need to support browsing with and without Javascript and has the added benefit of improve the rendering/load times for the first request. Again "it depends" because it depends a lot on how your site actually works if it is possible to use this. You have to design for it, and it isn't going to be trivial or easy.
Update:
For what it's worth we are taking the Year of Moo approach and rendering the pages that need SEO using PhantomJS and sticking the cached initial state of them somewhere to serve them up. We have a rake task we run on deployments to update this. Again this is just the initial state but it helps get around the issue for now.
Things are always changing though and I'm sure I will have changed my mind on this approach in a year or so.
Have you read Google's Making AJAX Applications Crawlable. You can have JavaScript single page app and crawlable content.
If you stick with angular, there is interesting article: Turns out it is possible to have your AngularJS application indexed