Angular Adventures – Part 1

I have spent some time recently working with Angular.js and thought I would record some thoughts. In particular I was working on an RSS Reader type application with ‘infinite scrolling’ functionality. So in dot points:

• It was very quick to become somewhat productive. The ‘phonecat’ example app and on line documentation are thorough. The documentation itself is pretty dense – so it is best to work through the tutorial first.
• In my experience the two way data binding was both the greatest strength and ultimate downfall of Angular.js in my application. Two way data binding meant getting a functional application up was extremely quick… a lot of typing was saved coupling models to views. On the other hand, for a predominantly ‘read’ application, there seemed to be some performance degradation with maintaining this two way data binding.
• I did manage to get an interesting ‘infinite scrolling’ implementation which I hope to share in a later post
• The $resource service made working with a json RESTful api a breeze

So overall, for a dynamic application involving both reading and writing of dynamic data Angular.js could well make you life a lot easier. For predominantly ‘read only’ applications it may not be the right fit.