Aurelia VS AngularJS Developers: What's Good For Your Business?

When it comes to choosing a framework for the development of web applications, an experienced programmer would always mention the universally recognized and well-known AngularJS. Nevertheless, there are a number of newer followers on the market that provide unique capabilities but are much less popular. One of these, Aurelia, we are going to review in this article in the Aurelia vs AngularJS confrontation.

Before starting the Aurelia vs Angular 2 comparison, we should explain why exactly these two were chosen. Both of the frameworks are based on the original version of the same Angular. Next, we will compare the characteristic features of Aurelia and Angular 2, and try to conclude which is better to use for your business.

IDEAS BEHIND ANGULAR 2 AND AURELIA

AngularJS was created in 2009 by Misko Heveri (Google employee) and Adam Abrons. The initial goal of these two was to build a platform for an online JSON service (GetAngular.com) that allowed to quickly develop and deploy the enterprise apps on the web. The business was not very profitable and in 2010 AngularJS was released publicly as an open source framework for building web applications. Essentially, it extends the capabilities of the standard HTML and provides two-way data binding for dynamic content (considered to be one of the major advantages of Angular). This practice significantly reduces the total number of DOM-related operations (we should note, though, that due to a complex implementation it can lead to hard-to-find errors in the code), and allows for AngularJS developers to optimize testing processes through dependency injection. A side project of Misko at first, the second version was already developed as an internal project of Google; is one of the main development environments and has wide support of the company to the day. Modern Angular allows creating web apps based on MVC/MVVM architectures. As a part of Apache Cordova platform, components of Angular are also used in the creation of cross-platform mobile software. Currently, the framework has a colossal selection of additional components and huge Internet community (which is very friendly and helpful towards newcomers).

What's Aurelia then? This is a very promising JavaScript framework, which was released in 2016. In essence, Aurelia is a collection of modern JS modules that complement one another together with an application-building platform. Aurelia allows building desktop, web and mobile software based on the MVC/MVVM architectures using mutable conventions (default parameters). It differs from Angular, first and foremost, by the unobtrusive focus, as the created code can be Aurelia-agnostic. This means that such a program will use a minimum or even none framework-specific constructions. In fact, this environment was developed by Rob Eisenberg, one of the leading developers of Angular 2, who left Google due to sharp disagreements within the team. Aurelia supports the modular software structure and provides high reusability of said modules. Alike to Angular, Aurelia supports the two-way data binding.

ANGULAR 2 AND AURELIA: TWO KEY DIFFERENCES

Next, let us begin the Aurelia comparison with AngularJS.

The first and quite fundamental difference between AngularJS and Aurelia lies in the approach to software components. When working with Angular, you have to set most of the application elements up manually. In the case of Aurelia, developers are provided with ready-made templates, the components of which can be adjusted or left at the default settings.

On the one hand, this fact can be credited as one of the main advantages of the Aurelia, on the other - Angular allows developers to "dig into" the essence of the solution being created more deeply and choose the most successful form for its implementation. Yes, this imposes some inconvenience in the form of additional manual actions on the part of the developer (for example, they have to manually designate the providers and the locations of the templates) but in the long term, it justifies itself by supporting the constant improvement of the programmer's professional skills.

The second notable difference between AngularJS and Aurelia (to the disadvantage of the former) lies in the reliance on HTML standards. In particular, all attributes in AngularJS are case sensitive, contrary to the standards of HTML and web browsers, in which the created applications would be launched. Aurelia, in turn, was designed from the start with complete compliance with all the current web standards.

AND WHAT ABOUT THE PROSPECTS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT FOR THESE TWO FRAMEWORKS?

To conclude our comparison of Angular 2 vs Aurelia, we want to discuss the future development prospects of each.

Relatively recently, Aurelia has been complemented by the Aurelia UX library, which provides developers with an impressive set of user interface-oriented features, such as interface components, scoped styles, and UX templates. In contrast, front-end development was one of the central focuses for Angular since the start.

Both development teams, Aurelia and Angular's, are actively working over a constant increase in the app performance. Currently, in the dbMonster benchmark, both frameworks demonstrate quite good results:

dbMonster results for Angular 2;

dbMonster results for Aurelia.

Unfortunately, there are no real success stories for Aurelia (that is, large-scale projects, which would be based on this framework). In turn, not only was Angular used for many of the Google's apps and services - Pay, Express, Code Jam Kickstart, Startup with Google, but also for such web sites and software as OneFootball, Microsoft Office Support, FitBit Community, IEEE Explore Digital Library, ABC News, American Red Cross Society, PayPal Community, US Federal Source Code policies, Cyph, ReDoc, and many others. Not to mention that Angular's developer community is one of the biggest among the front-end JS frameworks and loses to React only. We think that these facts are convincing enough when speaking about the prospects of Angular.

Anyway, it is up to you to decide how rational it would be to use Aurelia for your business. Let us summarize its advantages:

• low entrance threshold;
• strict adherence of HTML templates to WWW standards;
• highly reusable components;
• component conventions, which can be edited and reset to defaults when needed.

AURELIA OR ANGULARJS: SUMMARY

So, what to choose: Aurelia or AngularJS? As front-end frameworks, both AngularJS and Aurelia are quite great. An individual choice between the two is a matter of the previous career and personal preferences. Nevertheless, for business, despite all the pros and cons of Aurelia, Angular is much more advantageous due to the unswerving support from Google, enormous developer community, and a wide selection of ready modules. Moreover, Angular can serve a base for a future transition to more exotic JavaScript frameworks (the same Aurelia, for instance).