AngularJS and Enterprise applications [closed]

Question

we are currently evaluating the use of AngularJS in a Enterprise Application (e-Banking) as a Single Page Application. Many of the devs@work are already convinced that there no other way to go. It is the trend, it is future proof (html, css and js) it is easy to do, less burden on the server etc etc. Despite the interesting part of this framework, i am not convinced that there are factors that must be considered before going this road. These can be:

• Maintainability of code
• Testability of code, not only the ui part
• Continuous integration (like TeamCity or TFS)
• Developer friendliness like debugging, navigating through code
• Security (if there is a risk)

Has anyone any experience on enterprise apps build like that? I would rather go with Asp.Net MVC4. Please no hypothetical answers, i don't want to start a war. Real life experience is really appreciated.

Regards

Answer 1

I had thought about this when incorporating Angular into our enterprise application. First, some optional background information. I really needed to keep all my page state on the client side since recreating it on the server side is a very resource intensive task. I started off with building it with just JQuery, since I only needed a few things, but soon I found myself having trouble keeping track of the callbacks I wrote just last week. Hence, I wanted to refactor. While I was at it, Angular looked like the best fit for my programming style.

To address your concerns:

I think that it is more maintainable, since it encourages you to split things up. This, however, depends totally on your team and your discipline to keep things maintainable.

The Angular team definitely thought about testing when they were making it. Things are very easy to test, from unit testing to e2e testing. Others have even found a middle ground in between.

We use Jenkins at our Microsoft shop for continuous integration since it was easier for us to plug in our own programs to make it work with our complex environment setups. However, I don't think this relates much to which framework you decide to go with.

Coming from Visual Studio, I find JavaScript in general leaves something to be desired. I love edit and continue, unwinding the stack, and dragging that yellow arrow around. That stuff is just pure magical bliss. Debugging on the browser just doesn't give you all of that.

Security is pretty good. Looking through the docs, you can see that the team is concerned with security issues such as XSS and CSRF attacks. However, anything done over the browser is hard to secure. There are new attacks and bugs discovered every other day. If you are really concerned about security, you wouldn't have an online app. You would make sure that your customers only banked in the branch with multiple forms of ID. With that said, I don't think Angular is any less secure than any other JavaScript solution.

I would like to raise another issue with all of these JavaScript frameworks/libraries. They're all fairly new and constantly evolving. Look at how many functions JQuery has deprecated recently, and you'll get a sense of how hard it is to keep on top of your libraries. Many of these are also forgotten and left to rot. Angular being one of Google's products also makes me a little scared, since they have been cancelling waves of their projects. Hopefully, Angular does not become one of those.

The documentation is also lacking. Although the community is good, the documentation is not. Many pages are half done. Again, compared to the latest stuff from Microsoft, the documentation is pretty sparse.

This being one of the new things, it is harder to hire someone to help/take over this stuff.

Despite all these drawbacks, I really like it, and I'm definitely going to push my company towards adopting it.