Advantages of AngularJS over other Frameworks
If you haven’t tried Angular yet, you’re missing out on why people say JavaScript is the most supple language in the world. Most frameworks nowadays are simply a hustling of existing tools. They are an integrated toolset, but not very elegant. Angular is the subsequent generation framework where each tool was designed to work with every other tool in an organized way.
Here are 10 reasons why you should be using Angular.
- MVC did right
Most frameworks implement MVC by asking you to split your app into MVC components, then necessitate you to write code to string them up together again. That’s a lot of work. Angular implements MVC by asking you to split your app into MVC mechanisms, then just let Angular do the rest. Angular manages your mechanisms for you and also serves as the pipeline that connects them.
Because Angular acts as the moderator, developers also won’t feel tempted to write shortcuts between components that break abstractions just to make them fit easier. AngularJS Training in Chandigarh is a great career option as well.
- A declarative user interface.
Angular uses HTML to define the app’s user interface. HTML is a declarative language which is more instinctive and less convoluted than defining the interface procedurally in JavaScript. HTML is also less brittle to restructure than an interface written in JavaScript, meaning things are less likely to break. Plus you can bring in many more UI developers when the opinion is written in HTML.
HTML is also used to regulate the implementation of the app. Special attributes in the HTML regulate which controllers to use for each element. These attributes determine “what” gets loaded, but not “how”. This declarative tactic greatly simplifies app development in a sort of WYSIWYG way. Rather than spending time on how the program flows and what should get loaded first, you simply define what you want and Angular will take care of the dependencies.
- Data models are POJO
Data models in Angular are plain old JavaScript objects (POJO) and don’t necessitate extraneous getter and setter functions. You can add and modify properties directly on it and loop over objects and arrays at will. Your code will look cleaner and more intuitive, the way mother nature intended.
Traditional data models are the gatekeepers of data and are accountable for data persistence. Those data models behave like smart data providers. But since Angular’s data models are plain objects, they act more like a cork board. A cork board is nothing more than a temporary storage area for people to put and recover data.
- Behavior with directives
Directives are Angular’s way of bringing additional functionality to HTML. Imagine a world where HTML has many elements (for example <accordion></accordion>, <grid></grid>, <lightbox></lightbox>, etc.) that we never have to manipulate the DOM to simulate them.
Directives attain this by allowing us to invent our own HTML elements. By putting all our DOM manipulation code into directives, we can distinguish them out of our MVC app. This lets our MVC app to only concern itself with updating the view with new data. How the view subsequently acts is up to the directives.
- Flexibility with filters
Filters filter the data before they reach the view and can involve something as simple as formatting decimal places on a number, retreating the order of an array, filtering an array based on a parameter, or implementing pagination. Filters are designed to be standalone functions that are separate from your app, similar to Directives, but are troubled with data transformations.
Filters are so capable that it is possible to form a sortable HTML table using only filters without writing any JavaScript.
- Write less code
You don’t have to write your own MVC pipeline. The view is defined using HTML, which is more summarizing. Data models are simpler to write without getters/setters. Data-binding means you don’t have to put data into the view manually. Since directives are detached from app code, they can be written by another team in parallel with slight integration issues. Filters allow you to manipulate data on the view level without altering your controllers. Yes, this is a type of a summary bullet point, but writing less code is a big deal!
- DOM operations where they belong
Traditionally, the view modifies the DOM to present data and manipulates the DOM (or invokes jQuery) to add behavior. With Angular, DOM manipulation code should be classified directives and not in the view. Angular sees the opinion as just another HTML page with placeholders for data. This way of looking at the view pairs agreeably with user interface designers.
- Service benefactors where they belong
Controllers in Angular are functions that have one job only, which is to influence the scope. For instance, you can use it to prefill data into the scope of the server or implement business logic validations. Unlike other frameworks, controllers are not objects and don’t inherit from anything.
If controllers are so simple, then where should all the heavy lifting be executed? Angular presents Services to do just that.
Services are exactly what they sound like. They don’t get involved with the MVC of your app, but simply provide an outward API to expose whatever you want it to expose. Most of the time it syncs up to a server to sustain an offline data store and exposes methods to push and pull data to and from a server. Or it can be used to craft a resource sharing service that lets multiple controllers to share the same resources.
- Context-aware communication
A PubSub system is a pretty common tool that lets for decoupled communication. Most PubSub implementations on the web do not context aware. Sometimes you want a PubSub message to be legible only by children of a particular node, or only readable by the descendants of a particular child. Sometimes you don’t want isolated MVC components to be reading your messages.
The PubSub system in Angular is precisely that. broadcast() will send a message to all children controllers, while emit() will send a message to all ancestors.
- Unit testing ready
What description of Angular would be complete without talking about its unit testing readiness? The whole of Angular is connected together by Dependency Injection (DI). It’s what it uses to achieve your controllers and scopes. Because all your controllers depend on DI to pass it info, Angular’s unit tests are able to usurp DI to perform unit testing by injecting mock data into your controller and gauging the output and behavior.
