Angular JS: what are the problems/ pitfalls of using Angular? [closed]

Question

What pitfalls/ problems/ pains might I expect as I start building real and more complex apps with Angular ? I am at a new job and about to recommend Angular (and Bootstrap) as the basis for building all our web apps. After nearly 1.5 years of working with backbone.js I know I don't want to use it... We have a Node + MongoDB back end and no real investment in any client side stack. One unique thing is that we have some big data - one collection that will reach 10's of gigs in size with hundreds of millions of records... I have been reading up on and playing with Angular for past two weeks or so and haven't really found anything bad about it.

Answer 1

There is really no pitfall :)

On to a likely less zealot explanation: AngularJS is (as far as I've been able to tell) a lot more opinionated than backbone - most processes are dead easy to perform (displaying data, processing interactions) but follow a somewhat stricter pattern to do so. Supposedly it makes angularJS harder do bend to your specific criteria than backbone, but I have found it isn't so. Also, the few shortcomings of the system are quickly disappearing, as it is evolving crazy fast.

Point in case: the routing system is one of the lesser aspects of angularJS, as it is generally not very flexible (no route inheritance, no state machine)... I started making apps using a workaround that turned out to be quite clean, explained here. However, the folks at angular-ui have come up with a solid solution and a similar solution is bound to appear in angular itself.

The animation directive was also a shortcoming (animating the appearance and disappearance of objects is tricky, as they need to exist up until the end of the animation, and that has to be managed) and has also workaround solutions, but a core animation system was introduced in the 4th of april in angular 1.1.4, here, so you see, it is rapidly evolving :)

Regarding learning curve: it has some, but nothing someone with your experience can't handle in a very short time. This series of video tutorials is the best resource i know of, as an easy way to understand the gist of most things (the documentation is good enough and getting better, but lacks applied examples in some places where it would really helped - or lacked, they may be better by now - also, the "beginners tutorial" is dreadful, I personally hate long running, step-by-step tutorials)

Hope it helps!