Angular 2 vs GWT

I was first sceptical about using Angular over AngularJS. That's because AngularJS was so easy to integrate in existing websites. But building apps from scratch with Angular is so much easier. Of course, you have to build and boilerplate them first, but after that - you save a ton of time. Also it's very cozy to write code in TypeScript.

When deciding on a front end framework to build my bitcoin faucet project, I knew I needed something battle hardened, dependedable, but also feature filled and ready to go out of the box.

While I've written some smaller apps with ng2+, I've never gone full tilt with it so I knew there were still some things to learn, and most importantly: how to do them properly, such as proper component architecture and breaking old habbits from ng1.

I didn't opt for React in this case, simply due to the need to stack more and more things on top of it to do what I'd need it to do. I wanted a framework that was going to take over routing and execution of complex UI controls, and keep items outside of a component's scope updated and react to events. This framework needed a comprehensive event emission system, data acquisition and handling, bi-directional data binding, state, and a series of things that you'd need to install separately for React to match up to what's already in the box with Angular.

I opted to stick to Angular instead of Vue for the fact that Angular also already has it's entire build system ready to go and comprehensivly built to deliver the tiniest version of it's deliverable. I was hosting this thing in a google cloud instance, so I needed to make sure the app stayed as small as possible, and could automatically trim out the cruft. This is where Angular's built in Tree Shaking took precedence for me.

Vue is more than capable of handling everything I'd need, and it was something I took serious considerion of. For instance, Vue poweres Cointiply, another bitcoin faucet application that's highly reactive and high componentized just like I wanted.

But I'd still need to learn Vue, I'd still need to configure it's build system, and I still wanted to use SCSS and TypeScript.

So Angular it was. ng8 is a great platform for building very complex user interfaces, and has many of the problems you'd inevitably face integrating a user interface to an application already figured out, and complete with a best practice recommendation.

React and Vue, given enough time and energy, are super capable platforms. No one can deny that. Angular's "A-Z Batteries Included" approach to the whole development process is what made it especially enticing this time.

It is a complete waste of time and life to learn a different framework to solve the same problem (Both AngularJS and Angular build A+ UI's, but both require a lot of time to learn). It's dumb to spend 200 hours learning AngularJS, then 200 hours learning Angular when you could spend 200 hours learning AngularJS and 200 hours learning how to solve a different problem (like AI/ML, Data Science, AR/VR, Digital Marketing, etc.)