If you can't use Web Components (Polymer) then Angular is the next best thing. I think you should really try to use Web Components though if you can get away with it.
IMHO Angular is overly complicated once you try to dig in, for example to make your own HTML elements.
Building custom elements with Web Components/Polymer is the next step, along with promoting web components/polymer and working on getting compatibility in user's browsers.
People say its not ready for mainstream, which is true. _However_, if we all start taking Polymer/Web Components seriously, pretty quickly it _will_ be ready, i.e. it will work in new releases of Firefox, Chrome and probably Safari. And even IE 10 and 11. We just need people to start seriously trying to take advantage of it, patching things and pushing for compatibility/stability/adoption.
And someone might say something like "I think you are confused about what Angular and Web Components do.. blah Angular is going to take advantage of Web Components in the near future". So let me save you the lecture.
I have used Angular in 3 or 4 projects. I know what it does. I know it is going to use Web Components in the future.
But like I said, its too complicated. And most, if not all, of the things that you would do with Angular with/without using custom elements, you can take advantage of Polymer/Web Components features to do. And it will be much simpler to code and maintain, and not particular to any overall framework.
So as far as I'm concerned Angular is superfluous at this point, and a liability, if I am not constrained by immediately shitty browser realities.
If there is something that Angular does that can't be implemented with Web Components/Polymer, please let me know.
Have you seen this presentation the [1] angular devs gave? A lot of the concepts are pretty analogous to each other, and I think they will possibly start moving towards that standard.
Not soon though, that is up to browser makers.
Angular is close enough tot he general idea though, that I think it's proving the approach is valid to an entire generation of devs. Devs who would never have known about web components if angular wasn't legitimising it.
What is left for Angular to do? Really would like to know the answer to that.
If they are serious about helping move the web forward, they will just change the Angular logo to the Polymer logo and start pushing to make that work. And stop saying things like browsers aren't ready.
Polymer works in new versions of Firefox, Chrome and IE. We don't need a new version of Angular.
If someone thinks we need to keep using Angular, give me a reason. That presentation on Google Docs that is linked in the parent just shows reasons for Angular to go away.
they aren't ready. the standards aren't even ready for polymer to polyfill for the browsers to implement.
you need to be patient. open platforms are a very long term play.
i saw they reviewed a few of the polyfills for 2.0 inclusion, and there wasn't a lot that was really capable of being used yet, for a variety of reason.
I believe open platforms will win eventually, but it's not going to be tomorrow. it will be maybe 5-10 years from now. Just be glad there's movement.
10 years from now, we may not even be relevant as a species. I'm not kidding. Its unlikely it will happen that soon, but I actually believe that we will have super-intelligent AI within 4 decades at the latest. I think it is entirely within the realm of possibility for that to happen within 10 or 15 years.
I am looking at next year or maybe the year after that to see a massive surge in popularity and use of Polymer.
Oh man, I remember those days when the Wordpress vs/ Drupal vs. Joomla war was still in its infancy. Drupal was always soo yucky in terms of UX even though it was waay more powerful than wordpress. WP seems to have essentially won that war. Wonder why? Something similar happening the .JS world? Not really my cup of tea.
With a little discipline and a better data model(cause basically it's using a meta table for everything that dont fit the core,"post meta" values are serialized strings ...lol with bother using a RDBMS at first place?), Wordpress could actually be good(codewise),it has some good business logic.
Wordpress maintainers just dont bother...because obsessed with backward compat.
Drupal is in my opinion (oddly) easier to maintain for non coders,CCK an Views, no need for any PHP skill to create new content types or write queries in Drupal.
With Wordpress,you need to code if you want to extend anything.
My problem with both is that the plugins are written in PHP.A good CMS would have at least one plugin layer which would rely on manifests(xml,json...) rather than code(just like angular),or at least have a sandbox system with permissions,some kind of inverted oauth system (eg:"this plugin wants to be able to write to your db,write to your file system,access this or that resource...")
Honestly, your characterization of Drupal is just plain BS, and I say that as someone who worked on Drupal sites for about 5 years, and am glad to no longer be.
To say it's less powerful than "plain PHP" is just wrong, since via custom modules, which you'll be writing at least a half dozen of for a real non-trivial (e.g. the kind of thing you wouldn't just do in WP, just you can essentially just sprinkle in 100% custom "plain PHP" whereever you need it, while still being able to leverage things Drupal does right, like form handling and batch operations.
i wrote drupal's form handling layer (and theme system, and big parts of drush and much more)
I ultimately found that I was happier writing stuff closer to the way wordpress does it.
It really comes down to two things
1. depending on what tools you have available, what you are familiar with or what you are capable of understanding .. drupal or wordpress might be easier for you than the other. That's relative.
2. is the fact that the wordpress model is objectively simpler than the drupal model (at least last time I looked, around 4 years ago).
So I'm not saying one is better than the other at all, just that this is how they are different.
If you know, or are willing to learn, a bit of code, wordpress is most likely subjectively easier than drupal would be.
I'm probably a bit biased because I spent most of that 5 years pouring my heart and soul into a site that was, basically, right up Drupal's alley, a regional news portal that was very content heavy. We did use lots of various modules, some core, and some community - such as polls, forums, captcha stuff, comments, we had almost a terabyte of stuff served via ImageCache...
We actually didn't use Drupal forms for much on the front end (The occasional webform for user submissions, etc, but very few actual drupal api forms), but on the admin backend we had lots of little things I threw together that worked well but were not used all the frequently (and then only by power users).
Our frontend was primarily done through a system I called the Page module (Because it was the module that made...the pages - for instance http://www.reflector.com/news). That was actually a really cool hack. It worked a lot like views - but could actually run on a high traffic site without bringing the whole thing to it's knees. The trick was that the really nasty join across about 8 tables (node, the content type data, related image data, story body (for teasers), and a couple others) was done only on node save and that was stored in an index table (not everything on the node, but just what I needed to build a page). So to generate each news block was a really super simple query of basically:
select * from page_index where page_blockid = 12345
order by updated desc limit 5
instead of something like, and this is the super simplfied version
select * from node left join content_type_story cts
on cts.nid = node.nid left join taxonomy_data td on
td.nid = node.nid left join uploads on uploads.nid = node.nid
left join upload_files uf on uf.uid = uploads.uid
left join node_content nc on nc.vid = node.vid
where (td.termid = 1231 or td.termid = 1256) and
node.published = 1 order by updated desc limit 5
(Field names ommitted because that query is way too long as it is).
Of course, we were running multidomain so a lot of those tables where domain alises etc, again, all precomputed in my module.
No, I don't miss it. But it was powerful, and I did develop, deploy, and serve 3 daily newspapers with 20k+ circ each with a dev and sysadmin staff of 1. There is no way I could have done that if I'd had to write everything from scratch.
That is a total mischaracterization of what it means for a language or DSL to be "powerful." When you are writing not-X to assist X in doing Foo, that doesn't mean X is powerful-enough to let you do Foo; that means that X isn't powerful-enough to let you do Foo without breaking out of X.
To put it another way: the fact that you can greenspun Lisp in C doesn't mean C has all the power of Lisp. It means that Lisp has all the power of Lisp. Every even-mildly-useful language is Turing-complete; so, in order to be able to give a ranking to languages at all, we have to restrict our discussion of a language's merits to its merits if you aren't just using it as a glorified Turing machine for implementing a different language.
Without writing custom PHP, Drupal is less powerful than PHP. That's perfectly okay.
I don't think so, since Drupal does many things that vanilla PHP is actually quite poor at - like getting away from the whole "each URL is a seperate file" thing.
Also, Drupal is NOT a DSL, even in the way, say, Rails is.
i'm going to respond to the sibling in here because I don't want it to get more nested. I also suspect it might be downvoted. (as some of your others have been)
I'm _intimately_ familiar with the feature. That feature came in with Drupal 4.2.0 back in december of 2001, which was the second Drupal release I deployed a site on. It was also the first Drupal release to include any of my own code.
Back in the day the only way to get anything committed was to roll a patch and commit it to a special cvs repository, manually numbering it. then you had to mail the dev list with the name of the patch so you could discuss it, and then if it still applied dries committed it.
I tried finding the mails on gmane, but the repo itself and the emails seem to cut out before.
So while q?= was considered an acceptable fallback, and it was still cleaner than what we had before ... this feature has always explicitly been about supporting url rewrites.
When I built bryght.com, my first startup in 2004, trying to be the wordpress.com of drupal, before wordpress.com was a thing : I had to make sure this worked with it.
When I wrote Aegir, a distributed turn-key automated hosting platform for Drupal sites, I had to write the logic that made sure this stuff worked. I did that for apache, and with some help from omega8.cc, nginx.
Please don't try to act like you're an expert on what 'design patterns' we were implementing when we did that, because I'm telling your straight out now, that wasn't why we did it.
I spent 9+ years of my life building major components of the system, and I'm still really proud of all of it. Millions of people all over the world run the software I helped build.
For one, Apache isn't even what I'd recommend to use for serving Drupal - at my last job we were serving 50M reqs/monthly via nginx and it worked very well.
Drupal implements the front controller pattern...it has nothing to do with URL rewriting.
It is true that if you want "pretty" URLs on Apache you need to use rewrites, but I think it is a cheap shot to characterize using a core feature as it was intended as a "hack".
The original assertion was that Z was more powerful than X, and I merely stated that that is false because X is really the superset X+Z, whereas if you are using JUST Z you don't get X.
We're not talking about 2 different languages here.
I'd argue that Drupal has been quite successful. It lost the war of platforms for blogs and, to some extent, forums, but has one a foothold for large projects which require a CMS. I'm not sure it was ever competing.
4.7 and 5.x (the first versions I used) didn't have many nice themes or a particularly friendly interface for content creators, which Wordpress had and won. But the Drupal community weren't much into making simple sites (though they could be made).
Drupal has always struck me as a CMS for non-coders to create something quite complex, and when scaling something for a coder to pick up and adapt as they need, with a lot of stuff built-in. And it has definitely won on that front, with perhaps the most comparable system being Django, but even then Drupal is more Swiss Army Knife like: It can't open a tin of beans perfectly, but it can do it quickly, and a few hours in the tool-shop improve it a lot. Likewise it can cut down a tree (if painfully), cut your fabric and has a neat nose-pick built-in.
Numerous media, government and commerce sites use it. It is quite adaptable, gets the 90% done quickly (yes, the learning curve is greater than Wordpress, but a lot more is happening), and allows anyone with some PHP and CSS expertise get the remaining 10% done reasonably well.
I don't agree. I realized a intranet content /document management system with Drupal 6 a couple of years ago in just few months. It was used then by 500 users with great results and I used available modules except for one that I hacked together for integrating authentication with lob webapp.
I'm not a developer (sysadmin) even though I know some coding and I could not have deployed it with all those features in the same time developing it from scratch with php (or any other languages).
The most of the time I spent was trying to "port" the designer's photoshop draft in a Drupal theme (it would have been better to have an external guy/company do it). Rest of the time was finding the right modules (there are too many on the site) and then understanding the pain point of the previous system can thinking something better (but that analysis part should happen with any technology involved )
I would suggest that it's not quite so linear anymore with the rise of ProcessWire. I'd compare ProcessWire to WordPress for ease of use and Drupal in terms of flexibility and scalability – I didn't think it was possible, but it is.
Pretty much any conversation about AngularJS that gets stuck on "dirty checking" makes my eyes glaze over. As for "black magic" DI, if you're uncomfortable with a framework extending the basic language, it's perfectly possible to do DI explicitly in Angular 1.2. This is a project-level choice.
i was uncomfortable with the fact that it was being done in core, and I know from personal experience that it will only take a good enough reason to do something even dodgier with that type of thing.
my recommendation was that they remove it from core, and have it be opt-in through the use of ngmin.
they are actually removing it completely from angular 2.0, so it's a moot point really.
I was afraid of angular.js because it reminded me of React, Ember, Backbone, Meteor, [the MVC client side framework that JUST came out, oh, you missed it?], [the 20+ other ones I've already forgotten about].
I would compare Angular more to Symfony as far as PHP frameworks go - complicated & arguably overengineered solutions, but extremely powerful and conducive to good organization & modularity.
I too felt the exact same way when looking at AngularJS. It seemed as though I could spend a year learning/perfecting my skills with it... only to be let down in the end.
No way. Tear through some Drupal core code and you'll be dizzy, and it's pretty much always been that way. Angular takes a much more simple approach (for now). It really cuts down the amount of code you have to write, unless you really want to.
i've seen how stuff changes over time, it makes me aware of this stuff.
Drupal wasn't always that complex either. I think i'm probably culpable. I identified the point where I complected Drupal and set it on this direction, but that's another article for another time.
I agree with this. Drupal adds a layer of not much improvement as a trade for lots of extra work.
I think Drupal is a relic of the past when monolithic frameworks rather than the microframeworks ruled the day, I agree the same thing is happening in javascript world. The smaller/component/message based libraries win out after people know how to do things. In the beginning monolithic helps people make the jump, but quickly become too all encompassing to the point it hides what you need to know (asp.net's famous fail).
Who knows, drupal might have started off clean but when you are an overarching monolithic framework that becomes the go to for marketing/bizdev technology decisions then it bloats to EOL. You won't find a happy developer in Drupal-land but you'll find lots of marketing/bizdev peeps that think they are working out the need for a developer by using the standard bloated CMS of the day. Angular is still on the developer front, but if it gets big enough and it is monolithic then it is a problem.
Drupal could be worse though, it could be Joomla, both flawed monolithic platforms from the PHPNuke evolution tree. That fad ended in 2007.
> I identified the point where I complected Drupal and set it on this direction, but that's another article for another time.
I would really like to see that article. Because, I too have been involved in such things, several times, but have not managed to identify exactly where we went wrong (or even convince others that we were going wrong :) ). I think figuring out how to avoid that kind of complexity is one of they key challenges of certain kinds of software these days.
(For instance, some people think Rails has already jumped that shark, some people don't, but I'm not sure even the people who think it has become complectified all agree on when it happened and how it could have been avoided. When I see people starting something new that's supposed to be "like Rails, but without all that needless complexity", I just think, sure, Rails started out simpler than today's Rails too, and you'll end up in the same place (or worse) unless you can come up with an understanding of what went wrong other than "Those other people made bad decisions I would never have made because I'm a better coder", nope, that's not what happened.).
Yeah, I took a look at that when I saw you link to it initially, and will try to find time to read it more carefully and watch the presentation.
I still think actual concrete examples from real world projects would be great. (Maybe the presentation has some).
(That's what I initially thought the 'Beautiful Code' book would be about, but it looked like more about algorithmic cleverness than success in architecting simplicity. Which is good too, but many of us spend a lot more time struggling with the challenges of architecting simplicity)
IMHO Angular is overly complicated once you try to dig in, for example to make your own HTML elements.
Building custom elements with Web Components/Polymer is the next step, along with promoting web components/polymer and working on getting compatibility in user's browsers.
People say its not ready for mainstream, which is true. _However_, if we all start taking Polymer/Web Components seriously, pretty quickly it _will_ be ready, i.e. it will work in new releases of Firefox, Chrome and probably Safari. And even IE 10 and 11. We just need people to start seriously trying to take advantage of it, patching things and pushing for compatibility/stability/adoption.
And someone might say something like "I think you are confused about what Angular and Web Components do.. blah Angular is going to take advantage of Web Components in the near future". So let me save you the lecture.
I have used Angular in 3 or 4 projects. I know what it does. I know it is going to use Web Components in the future.
But like I said, its too complicated. And most, if not all, of the things that you would do with Angular with/without using custom elements, you can take advantage of Polymer/Web Components features to do. And it will be much simpler to code and maintain, and not particular to any overall framework.
So as far as I'm concerned Angular is superfluous at this point, and a liability, if I am not constrained by immediately shitty browser realities.
If there is something that Angular does that can't be implemented with Web Components/Polymer, please let me know.