AngularJS Thoughts

I've been working on my first AngularJS project since October. It has some strangeness, but on the whole I am impressed.

Pros

• Single language. I normally work with Ruby on Rails, which means some JavaScript is inevitable. Now I'm writing almost entirely in JavaScript and pushing the Ruby changes off to the API team.
• Easy, fast iteration powered by Node.js.
• Directives hint at what HTML should have been from the start.
• Simple module system for easy code isolation.

Cons

• Limited by HTML, JS, CSS, W3C; and not my imagination.
• jQuery experience doesn't really help much.
• Directives fall short of next-generation HTML/JS features such as custom elements et cetera. Check out Google's Polymer project for a taste.
• Module system seems overly complex with factories, services, values, constants, controllers, directives, filters. Plus everything lives in a single app namespace, so not much win over single window namespace.

Outstanding Issues

Please note these may be resolved by the time you read this post.

• I opened an issue to allow ngTransclude to operate more like <content /> and <content select="..." />.

WAT

• Directives are a big part of most Angular apps, but directive documentation is at http://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng.$compile.