Contract AngularJS Developers to develop an App?

[d...@deshartman.com]

Is there a forum where I can contract developers to build an AngularJS mobile App?

I have been playing around with the concepts and have a pretty clear picture of what I want, I just need someone that is already at a higher level of proficiency than me to get it done ASAP. It's not a monster project, but interesting.

Open for comments and ideas

Thanks

Des

[Andy Joslin]

Hi des,

I've made two public mobile apps: ClearConcert (angular + Dojo; code is a horrible mess.. my boss had me use dojo; with lots of hacks the final product works pretty well though), and SpatulaDad (angular + jQuery mobile; a less messy horrible mess, but a worse final product).  I've also made 3-4 very tiny private mobile apps with angular.  The only one that really feels native-snappy-nice is ClearConcert, because I spent lots of time fixing Dojo and angular to work nice together.  And yet there are still a few problems.

Angular may not be your best bet for a mobile app if it's at all large scale. ng-view doesn't support transitions currently, so you either have to always have all your HTML in the dom (risky for large apps - a $digest will check everything), or roll your own version of ng-view that does fancy transitions between pages (hasn't been done perfectly yet, I've tried but it's not good enough at the moment; it may not be too hard if you do it right). 

I am currently writing a mobile app in Backbone.js + jqMobi + iUi (iUi with javascript stripped out, only using iUi CSS) + my own navigation/transitiony thing written in Backbone.  I miss nice data binding and all of angular's bonuses, but Backbone is much easier to mold to your will because it's so minimalistic.  So far it is very snappy because I'm not letting a monolithic framework run things, and it is easier to manage because there's no magic involved.

So your choices for angular with mobile are:
1. Angular + some monolithic framework like jQuery Mobile or Sencha or Dojo.  You don't wanna go this route if you want to end with a really nice app.  The best is jQuery mobile, but that has slow transitions and keeps all your stuff in the DOM all the time, causing slow $digests. And jQuery mobile is just generally slow at everything it seems.  Dojo has tons of problems (hates dynamically inserting things into dom, bad navigation/view system, and more...).  Super big frameworks that do lots of fanciness with the DOM generally just don't work together well (so Angular + {some huge framework} = you have a hard time).

2. Angular + a minimalistic layout framework (like iUi with the javascript stripped out).  The downside is transitions are still going to be difficult, and angular is still just .. *big*.  But if you write an angular transition-thingy right it could work.

I ended up doing backbone instead of angular for mobile because I wanted minimalism and angular just isn't a minimalistic framework.  It's a complete solution that does everything.

I do think with enough work angular could be made to do ng-view with nice transitions included, if you just used a simple minimalistic css layout framework for your mobile look-and-feel.   But I wanted to try it with Backbone to see how a smaller solution than Angular would work out. 

- So if you want quick (you may say you do now, but you'll regret it later): Angular + jQuery Mobile + jQuery Mobile Angular adapter.  Your app will be finished reall fast, but it will feel slow.  And you won't be able to optimize it.

- If you want to be risky with angular : try to build a navigation system in angular with transitions and use a minimalist css mobile layout framework (I would enjoy trying this, if you want to try this way e-mail me at andytjoslin {at] gmail [.} com and I will take a look at your app idea)

- If you want to take a safe approach: I don't know what to tell you.  I don't trust any of the big JS-mobile frameworks.  I will see if this backbone.js approach that I'm using now works when my current app is done.

- If you want a guaranteed approach, one with a snappy, native look and feel and no unexpected problems: Go native!  But of course, you will have to develop for 2+ platforms...

[d...@deshartman.com]

Andy

Thanks for all the pointers.

I am an eternal optimist and would like to at least start establishing some of the framework to create mobile apps. I hate mixing frameworks like you outline below and if they are competing for control it makes life difficult.

I'm not using ng-view at all. It is too limiting and I also prefer the controller per view approach. What I am doing is referencing a controller in the template Url. This way I load a controller when I load a view and never load it if I do not go to that view. I have an application level service (controller) controlling changes between views.

I went down the native path and loved Objective-C up to a point. The issue I had was I needed a 10,000 line 3rd party library to connect to a JSON source and this is done in one line in Angular, so that ended my love affair with ObjC.

I tried the JQuery Mobile and the Sencha approach. JQuery is bulky and WAY too slow for mobile. Sencha is better, but you are tied to their approach of JavaScript. I built most of the app, but came unstuck with customising components. A simple Swipe to delete in a list was the end of that path.

So having tried all of these, I am still determined to tackle AngularJS. I like the HTML + CSS + JAvaScript ideal and I think this is the first framework that sticks to this approach. Directives give me the freedom to define the tags and behaviour, while CSS3  removes styling out of JavaScript. angular-ui is a good example of this for a web page approach. Maybe we could build a angular-mobile version of angular-ui.

You mention that Angular is a "heavy" framework? If it is a deployed (phonegap) mobile app would that matter?

Open to all the feedback I can get on this.

Thanks

Des

[Andy Joslin]

Hi Des,

By "heavy" I just mean angular is big on bytecount.  It's not a slow framework though.

I don't believe you need an angular-mobile framework; you just need a navigation system. 

[ganaraj p r]

Hi Andy,

Interesting observation. But being heavy means that it should be doing some weight lifting for you. 

Backbone isnt really as lightweight as it is touted to be. Backbone + Underscore = 33KB minified - dont forget that it has much higher level dependancy or JQuery (93) or Zepto(25) as opposed to Angular( Angular is 76KB or so ).  And then you have to "build your own" on top of it. How is that lightweight? 

I agree that the one or so thing that angular majorly lacks is support for animations. Isnt it easier to patch that one problem and gain speed in the rest of the parts? 

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Regards,
Ganaraj P R

[Andy Joslin]

We went with jqmobi instead of Zepto. And yeah, maybe it wasn't the best choice, but I wanted to try backbone on mobile.

You guys are making me want to write a mobile navigation service in angular now lol

[ganaraj p r]

That would be awesome .. go for it :)

On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 2:26 PM, Andy Joslin <andyt...@gmail.com> wrote:

We went with jqmobi instead of Zepto.   And yeah, maybe it wasn't the best choice, but I wanted to try backbone on mobile.

You guys are making me want to write a mobile navigation service in angular now lol

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[Andy Joslin]

https://github.com/ajoslin/angular-mobile-nav

Done-ish.  Some todos are still up on the README.  

I should've done this earlier :-)

[Peter Bacon Darwin]

Nice one Andy! Will look into this with interest.

Pete
...from my mobile.

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