Now that Google has announced it is stopping development of AngularJS, I have started to think about what I want to use for future projects. Its been a year since my post on my Angular breakthrough, where I now feel like I am thinking in Angular when coding. So do I abandon ship and migrate to the latest and greatest framework?
I still have numerous applications I maintain in AngularJS, and I see no reason to migrate them to a different framework. Some are kind of slow, but acceptable, and I am not ready to take on the mental anguish of a framework migration. Just because AngularJS will not get any new features doesn’t mean it will be broken. Microsoft Access hasn’t received any new meaningful features in 10 years and it is still a useful product.
However, if I was to start on a new project, what framework would I pick? It depends. If I had an enterprise customer looking to build a robust app, I probably would pick Angular 2/4/5. That would be much more performant, and there will likely be Angular developers around for years to come, where coders in AngularJS might be has hard to find as COBOL or Access programmers.
If I was starting a small project for myself, I would probably continue to use AngularJS, since I am confortable in that and can crank out code pretty quickly. And someday it may be easily upgradeable.
I am also hearing alot of buzz about Vue – https://vuejs.org/, but that seems comparable to AngularJS, so whats the point. If I didn’t know know AngularJS, I may have considered learning Vue, but at this point it is too late.
So even though AngularJS is being sunsetted, I am enjoying being competent in AngularJS so it’s hard for me to consider abandoning it. But I will likely try a Angular 5 project later this year to see if I am ready for another learning curve spike. If I do, I have to decide if I want to also learn TypeScript or Dart. I hear Google writes a lot of it’s Angular in Dart, maybe that will be the long term winner. Problem is most of the examples online are in TypeScript, which is an issue.