In 2015, we founded our company and as mentioned. We decided to build our webshop and online CAD on AngularJS. At that time, Angular 2 was in Beta stage.
From todays perspecitve, the decission does not really make sense any more. Yes, it was Beta stage. Yes, it was not that stable. And to be honest, the syntax and coding strategy of Angular is a bit more complex compared to AngularJS. But AngularJS was well approved, stable and – also from a todays perspective – easier to learn. We wanted to start. Whatever it takes. So we decided to go the „easy way“. We did not want to use someting like ngServe to build our app. We wanted to have it simply build using a grunt task and have it safely stored in a directory on the server. The app should be accessed on the same port as the backend functionality.
Things we did not consider at that time:
– The app is the basis for our business over next decades. This means it should be written on an actual framework.
– Angular 2 is totally different and there is no easy way of portation
– Updating or rewriting will need a lot of efford
– Unit testing of AngularJS frontend code is some kind of hell
At that point, I don’t wanna say that you need to use ALWAYS the newest framework for anythin. But if you know that there is a massive rework of the framework you wanna build your future on and you know that your selected framework and specially the used syntax will be legacy, DON’T use it. Specially in case of larger business software with long life cycles and security requirements.