Hard times, when we have to deal with the legacy code, that during its long existence in web, moved from developers without documentation, thus bringing with itself a bunch of complicated interfaces & making the code more & more complicated.
It’s a common knowledge, that a developer never built things keeping maintenance and support in mind. But now they are in search of the best way-out to fix these dents & restore the sanity in applications.
Developers who were looking for alternative ways to stack upcoming applications can use AngularJS to bring sanity to apps. AngularJS is a relatively new JavaScript framework from Google, designed to make front-end development a piece of cake. It possesses a wide range of frameworks and plugins.
But one should keep in mind, that while adding AngularJS to the web app, one needs some careful evaluation. It’s connected with the usage of JQuery or JQuery UI & other javaScript libraries in the app, because adding extra lines of code may slow down your own JavaScript execution. Anyway, for all that, we cannot ignore the following long-term benefits.
1. More close to MVVM Architecture:
AngularJS integrates original MVC software design pattern to build client-side web applications. However, AngularJS doesn’t implement MVC in the traditional sense, but rather something closer to MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel), where:
- Model is the data in the application, a plain old JavaScript object (POJO). Users do not need to inherit from framework classes, wrap it in proxy objects, or use special getter/setter methods.
- ViewModel – ViewModel helps to maintain specific views. ViewModel is the $scope object that lives within the AngularJS application. $scope is a simple JavaScript object comes with a simple API designed to detect and broadcast changes. Rather it is the specialized controller important to settle augmenting $scope in the initial state. It does not store states and neither interacts with remote services.
- View – is the HTML that exists after AngularJS has parsed and compiled HTML to include markups and bindings. MVVM is a solid foundation to design applications. $scope shares reference to data, controller defines objects behavior and view handles the layout.
2. Have a Declarative User Interface
To define app’s user interface AngularJS uses HTML. HTML is less likely to break than an interface written in JavaScript. Special attributes in the HTML determine which controllers to use for the elements. With HTML, app development simplifies in a sort of WYSIWYG. So stop spending time on program flows and what loads first, simply define what you want, Angular will take care of the rest.
3. Two-Way Data Binding
Two-way binding is the most awesome concept in AngularJS. Not only visually pleasing feature, but also has a fascinating real-time concept. Data-binding directives provide a seamless projection of models to the application view. Because of its seamless, no efforts needed from developers. With Angular two-way binding, the view and model no longer require fresh cycles as they may be prone to bug or simply need a lot of redundant and tough to maintain the render code – it handles the synchronization between the DOM and the model, and vice versa.
4. Uses POJO Data Models
Data models in Angular are POJOs, so you no longer need the getter/setter functions. add or change properties directly on it and loop over objects and arrays. This makes the code look clean and intuitive.
5. Easy Adjustable Filters
Before any data reaches View, filters help to clean the data and involves in something simple such as formatting decimal places, reversing the order of an array, filtering an array based on certain parameter or making changes in pagination. Filters are similar to directives as it works as standalone functions that are separate from your app, but it only bothers about data transformations.
Conclusion
In this article, we’ve covered 5 features of AngularJS that our developers consider to be the most winning. These 5 features can help you to get an idea why nowadays AngularJS is trending. For sure, AngularJS is not a panacea for all web apps, but it can stand the generic apps in good stead.
Pre-Sales Consultant
*instinctools EE Labs
