> and load up a giant pile of jQuery spaghetti

I'll have you know I spent time on organizing and structuring my code with early JS design patterns like IIFEs to limit scope, lazy loading of modules, and minification.

Anyway, in my experience, AngularJS was the biggest attempt at making structured front-end applications, and it really appealed / appeals (Angular is still very popular apparently) to Java developers; biggest ones was its modularization (which wasn't a thing in JS yet), dependency injection, and testability.

When we started out with an app in Backbone (to replace a Flex app because it wouldn't work on the ipad), I actually advocated against things like testing, thinking that the majority of functionality would be in the back-end. I was wrong, and the later AngularJS rebuild was a lot more intensive in front-end testing.

Of course, nowadays I'm repulsed by the verbosity, complexity and indirection of modern-day Angular code. or Java code for that matter.

▲

aryonoco 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Angular not only appeals to Java developers, it also appeals to .NET developers. TypeScript of course borrowed a lot from C# (having the same designer) and dependency injection, MVC patterns etc closely resemble .NET patterns.

Interestingly, new Angular is slowly moving away from these, introducing Signals for state management and standalone components, and I see these developers actually struggling a lot to adopt new Angular patterns.

Still, I believe Angular is a really great platform for building B2B or enterprise apps. It’s testing and forms handling is far ahead of every other SPA, and it actually fees like a cohesive framework where people have spent time designing things the right way; something I absolutely cannot say about react frameworks such as Next.js or Remix.

▲

youngtaff 4 days ago | parent [-]

Angular was created so Java developers could create browser apps

	▲	leptons 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Angular 1.x seems vastly different than Java. I doubt a Java developer would want to use it, so I'm not sure your claim is valid.

▲

aryonoco 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

PS and I forgot to mention, new Angular patterns such as Signals and standalone components great cut down on the boilerplate and the verbosity. It’s not (and will never be) something like SolidJS, but each new version is clearly moving away from the heavy OO-based and multi layered patterns.

▲

paradox460 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Wasn't there the Google closure compiler before angular?

	▲	brabel 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		And GWT which allowed literally running Java on the web (without a plugin, it compiles Java to JS). It still exists and is maintained but not a Google project anymore despite the name. https://www.gwtproject.org/