Why AngularJS is worse than a new ASP.NET WebForms

If anyone&#x27;s interested, I wrote about my experience with Angular problems in more technical detail here ( <a href="http://lhorie.blogspot.ca/2013/09/things-that-suck-in-angularjs.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lhorie.blogspot.ca&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;things-that-suck-in-angula...</a> ), and more recently here ( <a href="http://lhorie.github.io/mithril-blog/lessons-learned-from-angular.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lhorie.github.io&#x2F;mithril-blog&#x2F;lessons-learned-from-an...</a> )

I&#x27;m currently trying out a React + Backbone hybrid that seems very promising. It makes it possible to handle an infinite number of possible app states in a sane and predictable way. The tradeoff is setting it up and understanding all the libraries involved is probably beyond any &quot;Make your first SPA tutorial&quot;. But then again none of the architectures in those TodoMVC would scale to a complex app.

I picked AngularJS because I&#x27;m not an expert at Javascript and will probably code myself into a mess if I started out with nothing and had to find third party libraries and structure the code myself. Maybe AngularJS is a bad idea if you&#x27;re like the author and already have 5 year+ of JS experience and used to their existing development methods.<p>Not sure why the author think data-binding and declarative UI programming is trivial. When evaluating AngularJS and Backbone, AngularJS was much more productive to work with: code is much more succint, understandable and testable. Backbone turned out to be a nest of binding and removing event handlers, no better than jQuery soup.<p>Regarding the &#x27;too magical&#x27; argument, at some point developers accept abstraction and magic otherwise we&#x27;d all be coding in pure JS without libraries. AngularJS has clean abstractions that are understandable (especially for Java developers).

I work on both AngularJS and ASP.NET WebForms. In some cases, WebForms is the right choice and in some cases AngularJS is the go to choice. You just can&#x27;t say AngularJS is worse.

&quot;Witness the introduction of the frighteningly obscure “transclusion”. You could probably sum up AngularJS with this single word — it makes the inclusion of DOM fragments in your page sound novel and complicated — etc&quot;<p>Are you mistaking &quot;transclusion&quot; for &quot;directive&quot; ?

It obviously depends on context of the application which technology should be used. Though it was an interesting read for a different perspective.