This week I started learning AngularJS

This week I started learning AngularJS. I’m working on a pet project in spare time - a simple Facebook integration that basically lets you associate users with different interests and find matches. Really it’s nothing big, just a trivial way to explore Facebook API and AngularJS.

I would not call myself a front end developer but I did some JavaScript. JIRA is JavaScript intense so everyone has to know his way around.

My JavaScript adventure started with Yahoo UI a few years ago when we were doing our startup. It was too heavy and now I understand that it was a mistake to use it in the first place. But jQuery back then seemed too hackish/poor (I didn’t appreciate it simplicify).

Later I learned jQuery, then Backbone which JIRA currently utilizes.

In the meantime I goofed around with GWT, we all did ;-)

I thought Backbone was good. I really enjoyed the approach, separation.

But let’s be honest writing something complex was pain in the ass. Like in Java - a lot of boiler plate to get to the real stuff.

Now, I’m amazed with AngularJS approach. I really love how they managed to separate HTML from JavaScript, yet they managed to make it so easy to combine both.

It’s like you’d be writing your code is some cool server side rendered template engine.

The only PITA is documentation, or lack thereof. There’s a nice tutorial, but nothing that would showcase the usual use cases. Fortunately the community is strong and google will let you find nice examples.

If you haven’t checked it out yet I strongly advice you take a look.