SharePoint or AngularJS? - angularjs

Currently I'm working in a project which is a SharePoint 2013 sandbox solution, i.e. the custom code is deprecated, leaving with just the front-end JS development which we have implemented in using Angular.
In SharePoint I'm unaware of any server side coding.
So what should be my primary focus with career perspective SharePoint or Angular JS. Please help. Should I start learning SharePoint server-side concepts or invest my time in improvising my Angular concepts.

I think you should be aware of client side code and server side code both. As it depends on your project requirements. As now days client side technology is preferable as it has not much overhead on server also not so many round trips to server. but one should be aware of in both aspects.
Angular JS is a framework you should know JavaScript, jquery and any one JS framework to work accordingly.

There are many way that you can develop server side code and there are lots of tools given by different parties to do the server side code easily. But client side programming is more crucial these days as limited number of tools and knowledge on that area is not very good among the lot of programmers. So my opinion is to learn both but give more focus on client side programming. And make Anguer Js your specialty :)

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In 2019, how much is it necessary to migrate a site from Angularjs to another framework?

I'm a project manager of a market place and I'm trying to find solution for my concerns. For two years a ago we decided to develop market place.
In front layer we decide to use angularjs and our team professional implement front layer using AngularJS. We add dependency injection for first time to angularjs 1.3 and solve google analytic crawling in SPA website.
But when google announce On July 1, 2018 AngularJS entered a 3 year Long Term Support period. As a project manager I have a big concern because We living in 2019 and after two years whats happen for our website ?
But my biggest question is how optimistic how long can we use Angularjs?
how much migration is necessary for this framework and
Is it possible that the sites written with Angularjs are not able to work after 2021?
Google announced:
All AngularJS applications that work now, will continue to work in the future. All published versions of AngularJS, on npm, bower, CDNs, etc will continue to be available.
For more information, see
Angular Blog - Stable AngularJS and Long Term Support
AngularJS Version Support Status
It’s out of date now, and new projects should absolutely not be built using it. This isn’t to say it was ever a particularly great choice. AngularJS came out of nowhere and became popular by default, rather than because it had particularly great design. It has a difficulty curve better suited to a great roller coaster than a decent framework, and a bunch of weird architectural and terminology choices. What the hell is a $scope, anyway? And what is a directive? What does transclusion actually mean? Meaningless terms that AngularJS has created. AngularJS does some things that are fundamentally wrong, such as creating invalid attributes on HTML markup. Even Google doesn’t use Angular for their own apps, like Gmail, and there’s a reason for that.
In fairness, AngularJS was always a poor choice. Its idiosyncratic code means that unlike other frameworks, it’s not good at implementing an agnostic, javascript solution. AngularJS code looks unfamiliar to anyone not super experienced with the weird intricacies of AngularJS itself.
Thankfully, this decision is well made for you – AngularJS is now quite thoroughly dead, and only legacy projects will continue to be using it. We should be grateful for what AngularJS has given us, and respect the position it held, but we should be just as pleased that it’s gone.1
The change is only about "support" and it means, no more bug fixes and no more improvements. Other than that, everything will be the same. Although, you should consider some disaster scenarios after LTS.
I saw some posts about running AngularJS and Angular side by side and I think it can be a good solution for your problem. Since you have enough time to migrate, your team can develop new features on Angular and you can also maintain your current AngularJS. Eventually you can get rid of AngularJS depending on your project size and development capacity.
Please check these scenarios.
Running AngularJS 1.6 in Angular 5 (side by side)
Running Angular and AngularJS frameworks side by side
For Angularjs support, you can find the previous discussion on this portal: angularjs 1.x support lifecycle and end-of-life
And the question regarding migration, in my personal opinion migration is a better option as the latest Angular version provides Boost in performance, Mobile-driven approach, code Maintainability & optimization, and most importantly Reduced development time and costs with better support.
And if asked about the migration approach, I would suggest a complete re-write that can be the most cost-effective strategy. If you’re a manager, put your team through Angular training (live, online, videos, books). Allocate time and budget for getting your developers up to speed with Angular as the learning curve is steep and prior experience with AngularJS is not overly helpful. Then your developers will write the new version of the app as per best practices recommended for Angular/TypeScript projects.
And finally, it’ll definitely pay off in the end. And, secondly, the newer versions of Angular won’t let you systems become outdated or irrelevant.
There is a team called XLTS.dev who are providing extended support for AngularJS beyond December 2021.
We have used Angular JS extensively in our company for enterprise projects, mobile applications and continue to use it. Google's decision to stop development of AngularJS and put it on a EOL will definitely make developers to panic. But 3 years to migrate away from it is a long time and you can plan accordingly.
If your plan is to migrate to Angular, then you can follow their official guide to upgrade using ngUpgrade. You can find numerous articles online that explain how they upgraded existing AngularJS apps to Angular.
If your plan is to consider migrating to a totally new framework, then this will involve some work. You should take a look Web Components spec. Your existing directives/components can be re-written, with less effort, as web components (shadow DOM) or custom components (without shadow DOM). There are libraries that help you write these generic components - supported on most browsers today - Stencil JS, lit element and a few others.
The advantage of using Stencil JS is that it provides tools to compile your web components to target different frameworks (Angular, React, Vue, Ember).
The latter solution seems feasible as it allows you to migrate directives one by one over a period of time, without having to re-write the whole application in one go. In the future you can also re-use your components in the framework of your choice.
As for your question about will it continue to work after 2021 - yes it will continue to work. The problems you might face might not really be of technical nature, but related to hiring resources to work on it or maintain it.
I am AngularJS developer and I do continue to use this framework for some of my projects. I am aware that in not too distant future this library will be completely outdated (as some of you can say it's the case now), however:
AngularJS ecosystem gives you still lots of choice/support (as framework is very mature)
my main libraries as ag-grid, highChart or others, help to build great apps out of the box with little time
I still do enjoy to work with this framework for it's simplicity and flexibility
If you should build brand new app I would recommend React or Vue (or other framework) especially if you do not have significant experience with Angularjs. However if Angularjs is not new for you, you need to go fast - just use your experience and go for Angular.
Taking into account what you wrote:
My main concern is after 3 years of support. Whether after the 3 year end of support, Angularjs sites can continue to work without problems
Angularjs apps won't just stop to work like that, from one day to another.
As your project requires long-term maintenance, needs to be built from scratch and will take lots of effort - Angularjs ecosystem is then probably not the best choice for you (I do insist "for you").

Convert Silverlight APP to HTML5 SPA – tools and technologies

My team is working on a strategy to convert our cloud based Silverlight app to HTML5 app. Although we have been working on formulating a strategy to find best possible set of tools, technologies, and methodologies to convert our App to HTML, I am asking this question here to get some feedback from the large community at SO and to learn from experiences of the people who may have done similar things in recent past.
My question has a few parts.
Our app is written in Silverlight and uses WCF RIA services. Most importantly, we rely a lot on MVVM and we wish not to rewrite that logic again hence to reuse as much code as possible. What would be, in your opinion, the best possible combination of tools and technologies for us to use?
In order to make SPA, we would like to use some of the “cool” new frameworks out there but we really want to minimize our work (due to hard deadlines) and be able to thoroughly test our app easily and quickly (hence the code reuse). Is SPA even a good option or should we go for traditional MVC app? Keeping in mind that there are more than 200+ views in our app.
If we chose to go the SPA route, which framework is best suited in terms of life span. We have to move away from Silverlight because it is going to die soon. We don't want to be in the same situation again in near future.
Moving an existing Silverlight app to and HTML5 web app is the perfect project for AngularJS. Angular has it's own similar MV* design pattern, but you will not be "reusing" code from your existing silverlight apps. The main ideas and abstractions may be similar, but just the nature of how html and js work together, and especially how they work in angular, you have to do it the angular way.
Also, Angular is somewhat of an engineering approach to web development. It is not a learn-it-in-a-weekend piece of cake framework to master. There's a lot that goes into it. There's noob ways to do things in Angular, somewhat noob-ish ways to do the same things, and then the so-called "right" way of doing it so you may find yourself learning some ways of doing things only to have them replaced with "better ways".
If you want to "minimize your work" then Angular might not be the best choice, but if you want your HTML5 app to be really awesome then any framework you with will require some studying in addition to getting used to the inherent quirks of Javascript.
Angular 2 is hot and just launched a Beta release, but I'm still happily using AngularJS 1.4 for all production apps.

SAP Fiori application development in angular?

we are developing an application using HTML/CSS and using the Angular framework. The problem is that we are quite a ways in to development and our client is switching to SAP, I have looked and looked and all I can find is information about SAPUI5 and Fiori. Is there a way we can still use our Angular app as a Fiori application or would we have to switch everything to SAPUI5, it sounds like a lot of work for a custom application that is practically done but I'm not an SAP expert so I was hoping someone could provide some insight around working with Fiori apps.
Thanks -
in general it is probably a good idea to choose either one of the frameworks. Changing to SAP is a bit general, i assume you do mean here SAP HANA cloud platform? If so there is no reason, why you would not be able to use angularjs to continue your application and just use the backend data services via for instance an odata service (which also should be present for a lot of other SAP applications, there is also SAP Gateway to enable this).
So all in all i think it will be possible to go ahead with angularjs, at the end also SAPUI5 is just a frontend framework.
Quick search on sdn.sap.com brings up some interesting articles that might be of help for you like the following.
http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/front-end/blog/2013/12/15/openui5-or-angularjs-how-about-both
In addition to what is mentioned in AirBorne04 answer, if you continue to build AngularJS application consuming oData services provided by SAP backend, you will loose all the features provided by Fiori Launchpad (which are many btw). See the link https://help.sap.com/saphelp_uiaddon10/helpdata/en/f9/51b50a07ce41deb08ced62711fe8b5/frameset.htm
Technically, this is not an issue but suppose if your customer wants to implement Fiori Launchpad then it will be an issue. So I suggest that you inform the customer about this in advance so that there are no surprises later on.

Freemarker vs AngularJS

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.

What are the topics to ramp-up on when starting Silverlight\Web development?

I've been asked to do some work on an existing Silverlight project, mainly extending it a bit and doing bug fixes as needed. But there are a couple of ASP.Net pages too and a WCF service to deal with too. My background is desktop development with .Net so I think this is a good opportunity to start getting more involved in Web development.
So I'm trying to figure out what background knowledge I need for a project like this. Clearly I need to get familiar with Silverlight, but I'm not sure what other Web technologies, etc I need to ramp up on for this project. Obviously I would like to know as much as possible but in reality with limited time and resources I really need to focus on what I important in the near term for this project. Then expand my knowledge as things arise.
The things I'm thinking that are important in the immediate future are:
The basics of Web Development (I'm thinking this might be the most important\fundamental area to build a good foundation)
But what are consided the basics?
What is technology\language independent?
What is important for Silverlight?
The basics of ASP.Net (since there is some ASP.Net code)
What are the basics? ASP.net seems so huge, I have a 1000+ pg book here which seems daunting.
If you focus on Silverlight is knowing ASP.Net important, or is ASP.Net something I will continually run into?
How does ASP.Net MVC fit into the overall development picture and especially as related to Silverlight?
The basics of WCF
As compared what?
Any suggestions\comments on the list above?
What other topics\technologies will I run into if I continue doing Web development?
Note: Beyond this project I would focus on the Microsoft stack.
Generally speaking the amount of knowledge of ASP.Net you need to do Silverlight development is very very low.
Silverlight applications are hosted in a browser, usually via the <object> tag. This can sit on an asp.net page or a html page. The Silverlight template creates that for you, so you can forget its there and just get on with the Silverlight app.
Of course if you are integrating into an ASP.net environment (for example, islands of Silverlight sprinkled through an ASP.net site) then thats another thing. There are ways to get Silverlight talking to the HTML dom via the HTML Bridge but its not necessary. Really depends on what you are developing and integrating with. (new site vs existing)
I avoided ASP.net for as much as i could as the richness compared to desktop (WPF) just wasnt there. Silverlight changed all that. Its a Rich world on the web now!
Best place to start learning Silverlight is www.silverlight.net on the getting started part of the site. great Quickstarts and tutorials there.
Good luck
Only cursory knowledge of traditional web technologies (css, html, js, etc.) are necessary for silverlight development. As a consequence, you also don't need to understand the many cross-browser dependencies as well.
Here is my list of things that you must get a really good understanding of to be proficient at Silverlight development:
Understanding WCF (the Silverlight-supported parts) is essential. It can be a configration nightmare, but once working it is pretty stable/ reliable
You need to understand serialization used by WCF and how to debug the mysterious 404 errors. Get good at Fiddler and/or Firebug.
You must understand multi-threaded applications and how do debug them. Silverlight makes extensive use of threading to not block the UI thread. This creates numerous opportunities for race conditions that create what appear to be "magical" results. That said, it is incredibly powerful and IMHO one of the dominant reasons to use Silverlight.
What you learn about serialization and WCF will ultimately help you cache some data in IsolatedStorage. Learn about IsoStorage, it will reduce our bandwidth requirements and cost and improve your user experience
Learn about Linq - again this is one of the most powerful features of Silverlight. Combined with a smart client-side caching strategy you can offload lots of processing to the client.
Figure out how you going to support printing. SL3 does not at all and you will need a server side component. SL4 beta does, but it is not go live
Understand the Silverlight Roadmap as much as possible and plan out your roadmap to match/ sync with it as best as possible. I first built a SL2 app and I spent a lot of time building things by hand that were ultimately released in SL3. As it is getting more mature, there is less of this.
Download the Silverlight Toolkit and use it. But more importantly examine the source code, the structures, its build process. There is not better real world place to look for inspiration & best practices.
Good luck.

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