A unit test with real dependencies is by definition an integration test isn’t it?
I guess the unit in “Unit Test” is a bit subjective but every place I have worked we wrote both unit and integration tests that lived side by side. Integration tests used Test Containers and Unit Tests were isolated with mocks. So, only functional difference was the “unit” under test being more, or less, isolated.
The old AngularJS was pretty horrible in my experience, but Angular 2+ was leaps and bounds better! As a "batteries included" framework i prefer it to the alternatives that one would typically consider for front end development instead: React, Vue, Svelte etc. (though i would pick Vue/Svelte for more lightweight sites and maybe React because of its ecosystem)
That said, it still is pretty heavyweight which can certainly be a drawback, but not too much so unless you get into the reactive programming libraries and such, at least when compared with the alternatives: https://medium.com/dailyjs/a-realworld-comparison-of-front-e... (this appears to be from 2020 though, someone should do a newer writeup)
For the enterprise'y projects that i've seen, Angular seems like a reasonably stable and dependable solution to use. That's in contrast to React, which has needed way more updates in packages that it needs for the typical web project, due to its more fragmented nature. Of course, this might be viewed as a nitpick, but GitHub dependabot seems to page me more for React projects.
Also, if you want to use TypeScript (which i might go for, but only in some projects), then in my eyes it integrates with it way better than, say, React or Vue. To me, using TypeScript in React just felt needlessly cumbersome, especially with functional/hook based components.
When using React, i'd almost prefer to go for just JavaScript and enjoy the incredible productivity of being able to introduce and compose components very easily, way better than Vue seemed to let me. Of course, i'm probably in the minority here, because i'd go for functional view components and class based parent/container/logic components, but maybe that's just my antiquated way of thinking.
Also to conclude my subjective post of sharing my views and experiences, MobX > Redux. It's just wonderfully simple and easy to use for state management.
Hooks have been similarly easy: React's core hooks auto-infer the proper types, and custom hooks built on them don't require any particular type-plumbing in my experience...
It's been a little while since i had to work in the React + TypeScript project (nowadays use Vue more often) so it's not fresh in my memory, but sure!
For starters, even your example shows the awkwardness somewhat, it is essentially the same as writing the following (if you don't need the interface elsewhere):
Suppose i want to add a new property: now i need to do it in two places (the interface definition, with either syntax). Want to remove one? Same story. Rename one? Sure, your IDE should let you do this, but the change is still necessary in two places. Why couldn't i do something like this instead (the answer is that the language is just not structured that way, but clearly having duplication for no good reason whatsoever isn't nice):
Contrast that with a pure JS implementation (which is bad because it doesn't tell you about the individual props or their types, but surely one can also imagine just a list of different prop parameters):
function Component(props) {
return ...
}
Of course, that's more of a nitpick, but the code often reads worse than Java does in my eyes.
Another thing that i disliked was working with union types, especially when you're stuck with loosely defined objects in a legacy codebase, where you can't always work with properly structured definitions of "this one thing is a union of BASE FIELDS but also ADDITIONAL FIELDS FOR ENTITY TYPE A that won't be defined in separate places, because if we split it up for some reason this one library integration will fail to render UI components properly".
I started writing out more about that particular case, but realized that articulating precisely what was the problem in it and diving back into that older codebase to recreate code examples would take time and sadly i don't really care for doing that. But hey, JavaScript would let you just wing it and check each field individually before trying to access them, so you could let the code decide the behavior, not the type system, which is sometimes the path of least resistance. Personally, i think that strong type systems are always good in the back end, but i feel less strongly in that regard about front ends.
Also, i'm not sure that building TypeScript on top of JavaScript was the best idea: surely from a support/target platform perspective it was brilliant, but sometimes you get all sorts of awkwardness.
For example, the React TypeScript bindings themselves have something like the following:
type Booleanish = boolean | 'true' | 'false';
Oh, and in regards to TypeScript in particular (though this is also annoying in Angular etc.), their implementation of even enums is awkward. Consider that in Java you can easily turn any string into an enum value if possible and can also have enums act as containers for additional data, for example: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/how-to-convert-a-string-to-an...
Mostly I have various stylistic misgivings with Angular. I feel like I spend a lot of time on ceremony and piles of RxJS that would've just been simple function calls in React, which is what I did before. There are some things related to state management, especially module initialization, that it seems to me is a leading to a lot of code bloat to handle an initial state with null state that shouldn't actually ever exist, but that might be user error.
More acutely, though, since upgrading to version 12 a few weeks ago, build times have run into several minutes (most of it spent in the "Sealing" phase), and it's developed a habit of crashing the dev server process due to running out of heap (on 16GB machines). We've tried various suggested workarounds and they work for some of our devs, but not for me. The past week or so even a single character change means waiting for the dev server to run out of heap, then restarting it and waiting for a complete rebuild. This takes several minutes all in all and requires manually restarting the server in the middle of it.
I tried addressing the issue but I couldn't find a solution that actually worked, so I tried to upgrade to Angular 13 in the hope that it might go away. That took a day to just get it to build, but then I couldn't get our application to start. So now I've put off upgrading, which is obvs also a worrying prospect.
We're an early stage start-up in the middle of a major crunch and it's frankly a bit of a nightmare. I've been keeping busy in other parts of the stack as best I can, but as you can imagine that's really not what a three-person team needs.
Is this the fault of me, my lack of knowledge of Angular internals, and our messy code base? Most likely! But I did years of React before and I was never in such a mess. I also find the Angular build system quite hard to understand and debug and I'm not entirely sure what the benefit is. Something about server-side rendering? IDK. I do some Elixir/Phoenix in my spare time, I feel like I get 99% of the functionality there for 1% of the effort (and machine resources).
We're going to need to bring in outside help if I don't crack it in the next few days but I'm frankly not really sure what the budget is like. Fun times!
Heh, this seems like a case of different people having completely opposite experiences.
Had to work on an Angular project or two, they were largely passable and didn't cause too many problems. Admittedly felt a bit close to writing back end code at times, even - pretty boring and predictable. In Angular the type system was also reasonably easy to use, even with things like non-nullable/nullable/optional values etc.
Had to work on a few React projects, the JavaScript ones were pleasant to work with and develop (seriously, React's functional components are an amazing time saver for display components), but as soon as you introduced TypeScript and Redux as well as plenty of hooks and even custom hooks, it went down the drain.
Perhaps that's a bit what you're experiencing with RxJS, which adds a ton of complexity in of itself - being able to start with just Angular and go from there (or in my case - using MobX instead of Redux which is just so much nicer to use) might have been more passable.
It'd be more interesting to see how you replaced rails framework stuff that need 2 days to build your project with vanilla PHP code that takes 2 hours.
I've been using Sveltekit, which offers a back end server if you use their `node-adapter`.
Sveltekit uses an intuitive file based routing system, so for side projects at least, you can build out an app/POC very quickly.
Personally, I like Sveltekit's back end server better than Rails (to be fair, I haven't used Rails heavily since v3/v4) and Express. Having said that, I'm not sure Sveltekit's node adapter has been proven to scale yet.
Rails has a lot of nice stuff baked in though. So in terms of the many other moving parts of making an app, such as migrations, db connectivity, I think that's where a lot of time can be added on the Node side, especially if you don't already have a shortlist of go-to libraries for the core functionality you want/need.
Being able to deploy Sveltekit to Cloudflare Pages is pretty amazing. And with their new auto-adapter, you don't even have to change anything from the basic init setup and it just works.
