Angular 2 in production

[Laurentiu Nicolae]

I've used Angular 1 on several projects and now I have to start a new project and I'm wondering if it is a good idea to use Angular 2 or use Angular 1.5 until Angular 2 becomes more mature. 

Advantages of using Angular 1: 

- mature, much more examples

- a lot of third party libraries

- JavaScript (not TypeScript)

Disadvantages of Angular 1:

- will have to rewrite it to Angular 2 someday

What do you think?

[michael corbridge]

Go for it. I get the impression that the major plumbing is done and stable. If anything, the docs are the part that are really missing. There are bound to be some breaking changes coming, but I can't imagine it won't take more than some minor editing to get the red to go away

[Martin Wawrusch]

Same here. We are in the process of rebuilding one of our end-user facing sites with Angular 2. There were a few roadblocks but when you read through the forum here you find a solution for all of them. Angular 1 is essentially dead-man-walking. The one downside right now with Angular 2 is that Angular Material is not supported, which is a pity. However you can use either bootstrap or materialcss, both work fine, You will also notice that your Http/Api Stack will be much cleaner now.

Typescript is actually a blessing in disguise. We use to write a lot of backend and Angular 1 code in Coffeescript, which was great, but at scale Coffeescript (Javascript) gets expensive to maintain. Typescript, and the Intellisense for it in modern editors (we use Microsoft Code now) offsets the productivity loss and the type safety of Typescript ensures better correctness. For us it seems that Typescript really nailed the merging of typed/non-typed languages for the average developer, and while there is a bit more code to write (And what's up with curly braces and semicolons) it doesn't feel like one of those clunky languages like Java.

Basically if you start now you will most likely hit the sweet spot to be release ready on your end when Angular 2 hits the RC stage, which is perfect from a technology life cycle perspective, as you can maximize your investment in the new stack.

Cheers

Martin

[Laurentiu Nicolae]

What would be the biggest advantages of building the app in Angular 2 versus Angular 1?

THank you for your opinions.

Laurentiu Nicolae
Web developer
Phone: +4 0740 795 537

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[michael corbridge]

The biggest advantage would be that this is the future of developing for the web. As someone who came from a AIR/Flex/AS3 background, it was hard to abandon the pure ECMA approach to writing classes along with the concepts of encapsulation, casting, inheritance, etc. Now it is all back! Granted this all within context of Typescript. From a team workflow perspective, developing in ng2 just has to improve the process. If your web app is sufficiently large (or will be), ng2 will scale much better than ng1x.

[Martin Wawrusch]

Angular 1 is a dead man walking at this point. So right now you would spend resources on a technology that is essentially dead within 6 to 12 months. This typically demoralizes developers (everybody wants to work on the cool stuff) especially as you know you have to rewrite the complete app. It's also a business risk as you will have a working system, and the switching costs/risks get higher by the day - this is why so many companies still run core systems on COBOL. A sound strategy is to first figure out if the current incarnation of angular 2 supports what you need, and if not, extrapolate the time till when it will, and align your development process. Biggest weakness is that there are not that many plugins available, so you might have to port some.