benefit of using angular js on top of asp.net mvc

Question

Is there much point to using angular js on top of asp.net mvc since they're kind of both doing the same thing? What are the advantages to using angular over asp.net mvc + jquery? What kind of scenario would you pick angular in? If you do pick angular in a microsoft environment, what would you run on the server side? Would it be something like Web API? Or is there still benefit of using traditional asp.net mvc?

Answer 1

This question is a bit subjective, however here was our reasoning.

1. Let the client handle rendering of pages, free up resources on the server.
2. Leverage built in caching of cache servers since we are just dealing with <html/> content.
3. Since the pages are cached the only traffic back and forth is json payloads.
4. We have been using NancyFx, but WebAPI or Service Stack would work just fine.
5. We wanted to build a responsive single page application and AngularJs fit the bill for testability as full feature rich framework.
6. AngularJs forces you into a pattern that we needed for JavaScript, in the past our jQuery heavy applications turned into functional spaghetti (That was our fault but being guided by Angular helped out a lot).

As with all frameworks pick the one that suites your needs

Answer 2

On my site http://www.reviewstoshare.com, I am using AngularJS along with ASP.NET MVC. The main reason I did not go all the way with AngularJS was that SEO is not easily achieved with AngularJS. Keep in mind that my site was already built using ASP.MVC + Jquery for in page interaction as needed.

On the other hand there is still some "Ajaxy" nature to the site like comments, voting, flagging etc. Not too different than Stackoverflow itself. Before AngularJS it was a mess of Jquery plugins and functions within $(document).ready() callback, not to mention the JS code was not testable much.

In the end, I went with both.