Angular 1 is dead. Where to now?

Angular 1 has a massive market. It is by far the most widely used JavaScript framework available. It is a very opinionated framework, it has declarative power, and developers tend to lean towards the MV* patterns which has a whole lot of benefits and with which they are familiar with. So Angular itself is not going away any time soon.

The biggest problem with Angular 1 is that it is no longer being actively maintained. The main reasons for this are Componentisation, Performance and an inability to play well with search engines (SEO), which, incidently, are the main factors that have made its main competitor, React, so popular. There is also quite a significant learning curve with Angular.

Componentisation enables you to build custom component trees quite easily, and the resulting code is usually much more maintainable. Performance was always a killer in Angular 1 due to watches and the digest cycle, which was basically a system for monitoring every single changing item on your page.

There was a limit of 2000 watches, and as soon as you went over that, IE pages simply ground to a halt. Finally, having a whole lot of script on the page did not make Search Engine Optimisation easy at all. Search engines don't know what to look at with a single page application. They find it hard to walk the tree of links between your pages, because they aren't seeing what you are seeing, they need to interpret the script behind the scenes that is being executed.

So the Angular team announced a complete rewrite of Angular 1, because they found that the structural problems with Angular 1 could not be resolved via a simple upgrade. They gave their own existing product a resounding fail. In doing so, they signed its death warrant. 

What do you select then, if you have a whole lot of experience in Angular 1, and need to choose a JavaScript framework for your next project? 

Well, after analysing the market, reading a whole stack of analysis and reviews, having a play around with the technologies, I can say that there's not a lot in it. Because Angular 2 is so different to Angular 1, you don't need to automatically choose Angular 2 going forward. That said, because of the strength and size of the Angular 1 market, I don't see Angular 2 going away any time soon. It may be an easier sell to management, especially how much was previously invested in Angular 1 training, to go to Angular 2.

Steve Sanderson, from Microsoft, produced the following table, showing the benefits of the few of the frameworks. I really think the server side pre-rendering is important, especially when one of the major complaints with Angular 1 was the lack of deep-linking and SEO support.

There is one framework not shown here that has gained some traction in recent times and that is Aurelia, which has recently been released (RTM). Aurelia was created by the developer who produced Durandal. He later joined the Angular 2 team, had some input into that, but later left that team because he disagreed with some of their decisions. And some of those decisions are probably valid, while others may not have been, such are the egos of developers. Aurelia is supposed to have a more simplified syntax to Angular but doesn't currently have the market penetration. I have not done much at all with Aurelia.

I like to keep things simple. I like to look at what has solid traction, and try to limit my choices based on what the technical capabilities are, maintainability, performance, ease of learning it and popularity. This tells me that the two frameworks with the most promise are actually Angular 2 and React+Redux.

Although Angular 2 has only reached RC5, I still consider it a viable choice today, as, remember, by the time your app is released it will most likely have gone to RTM. There are actually a number of significant applications that have been built in Angular2 release candidate. The strong tooling and support when Angular 2 is finally released is also a consideration, as whatever your choice is, you really will want longevity of your code base, and you certainly don't want to be embarrassed by making a fringe choice that has potential that never materialises. 

Alternatively, you might choose to go with React+Redux, which is also available with Visual Core 1.0 and Visual Studio 2015. React is supported by Facebook, and is part of a more advanced ecosystem. Facebook are also innovating faster to answer any architectural issues related to component-based frameworks. Each framework tries to steal the best bits from each other, and both React and Angular have been doing this.  

If it was pure performance I was after, I think I would have to go with React. React is not an Angular killer, however, mainly because of the size of the Angular base and the structure it provides.  React is probably a lot simpler to get up to speed with, while Angular 2 has become better at this. It really comes down to how structured you need your code to be versus how much performance you need to get out of your web servers. With massive cloud based sites, extra web servers and lower serving capacity costs money, so I'd say they'd probably be better with React.

Edit: I just found another table that is worth linking to, by Shannon Duncan. It has more attributes compared, which make it much more interesting and may help you make a better choice:

That article may be found here: Angular2 vs React