gbadman

It is true that when you start getting into the realm of edge cases, substantial knowledge of the framework's internals is required to put together a solution that is consistent with the 'zen of Angular'.

The author argues that some of the challenges introduced by Angular's $apply lifecycle and its approach to two-way bindings make it a challenge to use in certain circumstances. I would rephrase that and say that Angular's state-tracking and two-way binding solution is a very elegant hack to a very complex problem, considering limitations imposed by javascript, css and html. Angular proposes a set of integrated solutions that allow developers to avoid a substantial amount of boilerplate (and complex boilerplate, at that) for synchronizing state and the view. As with every other framework, it is not appropriate for every problem.

That being said, I continue to use and love Angular in a complex app with quite a few moving parts. I migrated from Backbone.js about a year ago and never looked back.

In the absence of an html index, the plunker preview server will try transpiling to html from different languages. Markdown is currently supported.

Also transpiled are things like less, scss, coffee-script and more. Essentially, your html requests a file with the target suffix (e.g.: .css) and the preview server will search for compatible source files to transpile to that target.

As a user of ShareJS (for the real-time collaboration on Plunker [2]), I can see some interesting benefits offered by TogetherJS; the system has cursor and presence features out of the box.

That being said, the main drawback that I see in TogetherJS is that it seems to be tightly coupled in a way that it is hard to take smaller parts of the overall system. It would be great if the P2P network system could be extracted and plugged into a node.js Stream interface. That would allow the code to plug into a whole ecosystem of interesting libraries [3].

I'm really excited by all the powerful libraries that Mozilla has been pumping out these days. The web is a great place to be.

Fortunately, the users on the Google group are very active and people like John Lindquist[1] are putting out insightful and approachable tutorials.

I think that one of the major issues faced by AngularJS from an adoption standpoint is that people see the simple examples on the front page and assume that, while powerful, it is best suited for toy apps. I'm not sure how to address this, but I've seen the perception repeated over and over by potential users who have done a 'surface check' and have then based their conclusion on an incomplete picture.