Rebuild the front-end with AngularJS

[janhartigan]

Over the past few weeks I've gotten deep into development of a pretty complex AngularJS app. I'm now at a point where I prefer Angular to Knockout. Some of the key advantages are:

• Clear separation of concerns. To think of the separation in terms of Laravel, Angular controllers are like Laravel controllers, services are like repositories, models are like models, directives are kind of like views (but with encapsulated logic), filters are sort of like accessors mixed with view composers.
• No more annoying view rendering errors. This was one of the biggest pains in the ass in Knockout.
• Full unit and functional/e2e testing! With this, Administrator would be full tested from top to bottom. At the moment, there are only unit tests for the back end (I still need to get functional tests in for the back end).
• Generally speaking, code is cleaner and easier to understand. This will hugely help getting people involved. I frequently hear that the biggest impediment people have to helping with this package is the convoluted Knockout front end. Hopefully this will eliminate that and get more people interested in learning Angular.

Curious to hear anyone's thoughts on this. I plan on starting to implement this soon, but it could take a while to complete.

[donaldallen]

+1. Knockout is a PITA.

[Morgon]

My only thought is +1, if that counts.

[janhartigan]

All opinions count and it's helpful to know what you guys think :)

[battika]

+1, Angular is bliss

[jakubwolny]

I think backbone with backbone-relational and backbone-validation will be sensible choice. In addition there are some great ready-to-use UI components like backgrid (grid).

[roberto-butti]

+1 for Angular. I found a nice post about Angular VS Knockout: http://blog.nebithi.com/knockoutjs-vs-angularjs/

[Grom-S]

any chances?

[rpeterson]

I will look into scheduling some time to look into contributing this.

[ifox]

+1 for Angular

[yhbyun]

+1 for Angular, too

[feefk]

+1 for angular

[nickwanhere]

+1 for angular!

[amanpatel]

:+1: +1 for the change

Thanks for soliciting our opinions. In the end, it comes down to whatever the author is most comfortable with. Here are the choices that seem legitimate.

1) AngularJS (already presented)

2) Backgrid/Backbone. Consensus is that this is the most "free form" between Angular, Ember. I've used this successfully in smaller projects and seems to handle large datasets well. URL: http://backgridjs.com/#basic-example

Posible plugins

Generating forms: https://github.com/powmedia/backbone-forms Undo/redo feature via: http://backbone.undojs.com/ Relationship "reordering" via: http://rotundasoftware.github.io/backbone.collectionView/

Since this component is already a editable grid, you could "ride" on that feature. Also the column definition for backgrid seems to coincide in many ways with administrator's model config files.

Also has a form library that could help with the editable form widget:

3) EmberJS. This seems to be the new kid on the block. The most jaw-dropping vote for this choice seems to be this particular nugget, which seems to do some really slick "div" based tables with fixed columns and rows for scrolling: URL: http://www.emberjs.com

Posible plugins

Table Component http://addepar.github.io/ember-table/#/ember-table/overview

Just throwing ideas around :-)

[anothergituser]

Knockout i'd say.

And please, can someone have a look at #783 issue

[Mythli]

nockout knockout