Aurelia vs Angular: Which is Better?

A web application framework (WAF), also known as a web framework (WF), supports the development of web applications, which includes web application programming interfaces (APIs), web resources, and web services. Web application frameworks standardize the approaches developers use to build and implement web applications, largely by automating everyday tasks. For example, they often include libraries of routines that perform tasks like database access, session management, and creating framework templates. This routine helps promote the reuse of code, which reduces development time.

Many WAFs are currently available, so selecting one the best requires you to compare them in many areas. Angular and Aurelia development services are popular JavaScript (JS) client frameworks that decision-makers often consider when developing applications for desktops, mobile device apps, and the web. The use of the JavaScript framework is currently a critical factor for software development frameworks, according to a 2018 survey by StackOverflow, showing that nearly 70 percent of developers consider JavaScript to be their primary coding language.

An Angular and an Aurelia developer includes the modern features needed to build complex applications such as HTML, routing, single page application (SPA), and user interface (UI) composition. However, significant differences in their performance and capabilities also exist, requiring careful consideration of many trade-offs. They both abide by rights reserved regulations.

Angular is an open-source TypeScript-based framework developed by the Angular Team at Google and its community of organizations and individuals. TypeScript is an open-source programming language developed by Microsoft and first released in 2012. Its primary difference from JavaScript frameworks is that TypeScript does more code checking at compile time.

Angular is a ground-up rewrite of AngularJavaScript and is generally considered a separate product. Angular was initially released in 2016 and is currently in version 9.0.0, as of February 2020. Active support for this version of Angular will end in July 2020, and long-term support (LTS) will end in July 2021.

Aurelia is an open-source framework developed by Durandal Inc. and licensed under the MIT license. It is known for its rendering speed, memory efficiency, and data flow benefits. A survey in early 2020 shows that the number of people who have used Angular and plan to continue using it has dropped by 2 percent compared to the same time in 2019. Furthermore, the overall interest in Angular dropped by about 1 percent.

Introduction

Angular and Aurelia are two popular JavaScript frameworks used for building modern web applications. Both frameworks have their strengths and weaknesses, and choosing the right one for a project can be a daunting task. In this article, we will provide a brief overview of both frameworks, their features, and their differences.

Brief Overview of Angular and Aurelia

Angular is a JavaScript framework developed by Google, first released in 2010. It is a full-fledged framework that provides a wide range of features, including data binding, dependency injection, and a powerful template engine. Angular is widely used in enterprise-level applications and has a large community of developers.

Aurelia, on the other hand, is a newer framework, first released in 2015. It is a lightweight framework that focuses on simplicity and ease of use. Aurelia is designed to be highly customizable and provides a flexible architecture that allows developers to build complex applications.

Purpose of the Article

The purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive comparison of Angular and Aurelia, highlighting their differences and similarities. We will explore the features of both frameworks, their strengths and weaknesses, and provide guidance on choosing the right framework for a project.

Aurelia

Aurelia was initially released in 2015 and is currently in its first version. Business development interest in an Aurelia developer peaked in mid-2016 in the United States. As of mid-2019, interest was about 25 percent of that peak. This trend is typical of other JavaScript frameworks; initial interest rises quickly and then fades as developers turn their attention toward next-generation products.

Convention over Configuration

The Aurelia developers framework favors convention over configuration, so it has minimal impact on development. This software design paradigm, also known as “coding by convention,” reduces the number of decisions that developers need to make, ideally without sacrificing the experience of flexibility. David Heinemeier Hansson introduced this philosophy in Ruby on Rails, another web development framework. However, it's closely related to earlier software development concepts, like the principle of least astonishment and sensible defaults.

Coding by convention essentially means that a developer only needs to specify an application's unconventional aspects. For example, if a model has a class called Sales, the database will have a corresponding table called “Sales” by default. The developer doesn't need to write code custom elements for these names unless deviating from this convention. Aurelia's behavior is similar when writing configuration files; the developer only needs to specify settings when the desired behavior deviates from the convention services.

Custom Elements

Aurelia development services is a collection of JavaScript modules that serve as a platform for building applications for web development browsers, desktops, and mobile devices. Building mobile and web applications in Aurelia developer generally consists of composing simple components with standard JS and TypeScript classes and an HTML template. These modules implement specific features of Aurelia, such as the following:

• Binding
• Dependency injection
• Metadata
• Routing
• Templating

The binding syntax in Aurelia facilitates data binding, making it easier to connect user interfaces with underlying data models.

Developers can use many of these modules individually in any JavaScript project, including Node.js.

Open Web Standards

Aurelia developer also uses the Document Object Model (DOM) standard, independent of both platforms and language. This standard places web documents in a tree structure such that each node in the structure represents part of a document. Aurelia developer implements its own HTML parser and JS extensions, while also leveraging DOM APIs to optimize performance. It's also based on the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C's) Web Components, which will allow Aurelia development applications to evolve as this standard advances without requiring significant rewrites.

History

Rob Eisenberg is a central figure in the development core team of both Angular and Aurelia. He discussed his reasons for leaving the Angular team at Google to develop Aurelia in a 2016 interview with Cuttlesoft. Rob's approach to software development services is heavily influenced by his love of music, which he also studied in college. He views the software development experience as a combination of art and reasoning with custom attributes, just as with musical composition.

Open-Source Advantages

Rob is a strong proponent of open-source software, which has dramatically affected his career as a professional software developer. He regards the developer community as one of its greatest advantages because it provides a sense of camaraderie that easily allows developers to get help. It also means a closer relationship between developers producing the source and its users, which helps the code grow more efficiently. Another advantage of open-source software is that bugs are identified and fixed faster because more eyes are looking at the code. Developers also have greater freedom, since there aren’t any owners to dictate the course that development should take. Modern architecture concepts in frameworks like Aurelia further enhance front-end application development by focusing on ease of use and efficient design.

Community Support

Developers can build commercial add-ons for Aurelia development that support enterprises. Organizations can form a support level agreement (SLA) with Aurelia that puts both development teams in touch with each other. Enterprises can submit support tickets that receive priority according to the terms of the SLA. This added value is worth the cost for many enterprises since they can obtain the advantages of open-source software while retaining the support of proprietary software. Aurelia will also support version 1 clients for a year after version 2, while users make this transition.

Future Developments

Rob expects the trend towards open-source development services to continue growing. Software, specifically Aurelia development services, is already where some open-source code is a virtual necessity. Organizations that have previously been reluctant to adopt open-source developments are beginning to recognize its benefits. More developers want open-source, making adoption more a matter of management and company politics than a technical issue. Major players like Apple and Microsoft are embracing open source, and other developers will soon follow suit.

In particular, Microsoft has kept web applications and software development as part of its core competency, which isn't the case with Google. Most of their revenue comes from ads, so they take a very different approach to software development. While they are working on Angular as an open-source project, they don't consider it a Google product, nor do they consider Angular developers to be their customers. On the other hand, Microsoft does consider .Net developers to be their customers. This difference in business perspective has profound implications for open-source developers.

Reasons for Leaving Google (Angular Team)

Rob left Google due to irreconcilable differences he had with the rest of the Angular team. He felt their design choices wouldn't be sufficiently flexible when Angular was implemented. He also thought Angular's development services process was disconnected from its user community, especially when work began on version 2. Despite Google's strong interest in supporting its users and data availability, it never produced any case studies or use cases for Angular.

The Angular development team is organized as a subteam of Google's Adwords Customer Relationships Management (CRM) team. The Adwords CRM system thus drives anything Angular does because it isn't an independent product. Angular doesn't have a business side because it's funded internally by Adwords, which has its own agenda.  

Take Away

Rob's take away from his time at Google is that companies are spending millions of dollars developing software on JavaScript framework platforms without official support from the makers of those platforms. The system at Google simply isn't set up so that a software development firm can simply offer Google money to fix a bug. In practice, the company would have to hire a development team on the side to do it, which would likely be a breach of Angular's terms of service (TOS). Rob left Google because he realized that this structure created business problems that no one at Google was working on to any significant extent. He couldn't solve them while working on the Angular team because the solution is to create a company and product with the structure needed to provide accountability to its client-side.

Comparison

The Slant favors Aurelia frameworks over Angular for a client-side JavaScript frameworks Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) framework as of 2020, ranking Aurelia third and Angular fifth. The MVVM software architectural pattern promotes separation of graphical user interface (GUI) development with that of business logic, generally through a markup language or dedicated GUI code. This model exposes data objects such that developers can easily manage and present them to their client-side users. Important areas to compare Aurelia and Angular include the following:

• Convention over configuration
• Standards compliance
• Popularity
• Commercial backing
• Language support
• Routing
• Documentation
• Interoperability
• Convention over Configuration

Convention over Configuration

The “convention over configuration” philosophy is an advantage for Aurelia development services. This design approach means that Aurelia is unobtrusive to core team developers, in addition to being easy to learn and understand. The Aurelia framework only requires developers to follow simple conventions without the configurations that Angular needs. Aurelia’s syntax is also easier to learn since developers can build components in vanilla Typescript and JavaScript frameworks.

For instance, creating a basic component in Aurelia involves defining a simple class and template, showcasing the framework's ease of use.

Aurelia core team developers can also focus on application logic without worrying about Aurelia framework issues. For example, developers can make an Aurelia component without annotating it with a decorator or specifying metadata. Aurelia developers take care of many of these things by itself, provided the developer follows simple conventions. As a result, development takes less time in Aurelia than in Angular since Aurelia programmers can concentrate more on business logic.

Aurelia’s highly modular approach to software design allows developers to build applications the way they want without being forced into particular rules or paradigms. Developers can also replace individual modules more easily in Aurelia since they can be used separately or as a full framework.

Standards Compliance

Aurelia is fully compliant with existing web standards, as well as those that are currently emerging. Angular is far behind on this issue and is continuing to deviate from the standards. Aurelia libraries are more agnostic than Angular, meaning they contain mostly vanilla JS and TS classes. Developers can easily change implementations and test their code more easily in Aurelia while maintaining a business orientation experience.

Case sensitivity is one of the most obvious areas where Angular's lack of compliance has implications for developers. Standard HTML is case-insensitive, so HTML tags in the Aurelia framework are case-insensitive. Angular uses case-sensitive syntax, so it can't use HTML parsers in web browsers. That means web browsers can't handle directives like ngFor and ngModel natively. NgFor changes the structure of the DOM, allowing it to repeat a given HTML template for each value in an array. The Ng-model directive binds the value of HTML controls to application data.

The Aurelia framework allows developers to wrap all templates in a single tag easily. This task is challenging to accomplish in Angular and may not be possible at all. Even if when is, Angular requires the developer to provide the templates and elements' names.

Data Binding

The difference in design philosophy between the two framework developments is also apparent when binding events to actions. Aurelia easily supports both one-way and two-way binding, which is difficult in Angular and can lead to confusion among developers. In one-way binding, data only flows from objects to the user interface (UI). Two-way binding allows the synchronized transfer of data between objects and the UI, meaning any changes in one are reflected in the other.

In Aurelia, a child component plays a crucial role in data binding and event binding. Child components encapsulate complexity by handling subroutes and allow for content projection, demonstrating their functionality through examples of event binding and data interaction between parent and child components.

Aurelia defaults to one-way binding, following conventional wisdom. Two-way binding is more common for uses, such as binding an input widget to a particular view-model. However, many developers consider two-way binding to be an anti-pattern experience, making it difficult to understand what the code is doing in complex applications. Aurelia’s syntax to bind variables within a class is also similar to the way JS does it. Aurelia developers can specify the type of binding they’re using, which aids in single page application self-documentation.

Popularity

A recent survey by Hot frameworks consistently shows that Angular is more popular than Aurelia across multiple scoring methods. Angular has a Github Score of 90, a Stack Overflow score of 95, and an overall score of 92. In comparison, Aurelia has a Github Score of 75, a Stack Overflow score of 63, and an overall score of 69. One reason for Aurelia's comparative lack of popularity may be the lack of major, successful web applications built in Aurelia, until recently. Microsoft just published their careers site using Aurelia!

Commercial Backing

Angular is backed by Google, which provides it with a broad ecosystem and user community. However, this large community also means that Google doesn't provide Angular users with individual support, so it's completely open-source.

Aurelia has a smaller ecosystem, so its third-party components aren't widely available. It supports Aurelia applications through its base company Blue Spire Inc., which also provides consulting services for Aurelia users. Furthermore, Aurelia's ecosystem experience is growing rapidly, mainly due to its ease of front end and back end development, simplicity, and standards compliance.

Language Support

Angular requires the developer to write JS code only in Typescript. Aurelia developers can use Typescript, but they can also choose other coding languages like ECMAScript (ES) and all its variants, which provide developers with much more flexibility. While developers can use ES in Aurelia, they're still strongly encouraged to use Typescript because most of Aurelia's documentation and resources use Typescript.

ES is a specification for scripting languages published by Ecma International to standardize JS, which has remained ES's widespread implementation since it was published in 1997. Other common variants of ES include ES5, ES 2015, ES 2016, and ES .Next. Aurelia also has tools like Gulpfiles, which aid in converting one ES variant to another.

Routing

Both frameworks similarly handle routing configuration, although the definition of those routes is significantly different. In Aurelia, developers define parent routes in one place and put the configuration for sub-routes into the child components. This approach completely encapsulates the components, hiding their inner complexity. Dynamic loading plays a crucial role in enhancing template compilation and performance in Aurelia, contributing to capabilities like custom HTML element creation and efficient data binding. Angular developers must define a module’s routes within a central configuration file, including paths, routable components, and sub-routes. This approach makes route definition much more complex in Angular.

Documentation

Aurelia and Angular both have an abundance of documentation and tutorials, allowing developers to learn the basics of these frameworks by following the tutorials on their respective sites. The most noticeable difference in this area is that Angular’s documentation has a steeper learning curve. The main reason for this difference is that Angular continuously updates its framework, requiring developers to learn new changes and adapt to them constantly. Furthermore, Angular is the more complex framework, making it more challenging to transition from simply using to changing how it works.

While Angular has a steep learning curve due to its frequent updates, Aurelia's rich documentation and tutorials help ease the learning process for new users.

Interoperability

Aurelia works well with other frameworks and has an advantage in interoperability over Angular. For example, Developers can use React components by creating a custom Aurelia element. Aurelia also works with Polymer, since they're both based on the WebComponents standards.

Community and Ecosystem

Both Angular and Aurelia have a strong community of developers, but the size and scope of their ecosystems differ significantly.

Community Support and Documentation

Angular has a massive community of developers, with millions of users worldwide. The Angular team provides extensive documentation, tutorials, and guides to help developers get started with the framework. Additionally, there are numerous online resources, including blogs, forums, and social media groups, where developers can ask questions and share knowledge.

Aurelia, on the other hand, has a smaller but still active community of developers. The Aurelia team provides good documentation and tutorials, but the resources are not as extensive as those available for Angular. However, the Aurelia community is known for being highly responsive and supportive, with many developers actively contributing to the framework’s development.

In terms of community support, Angular has a clear advantage due to its larger user base and more extensive resources. However, Aurelia’s smaller community is still highly engaged and supportive, making it a great choice for developers who value a more personalized experience.

Ongoing Developments

Both Angular and Aurelia are evolving rapidly, and both products will experience significant changes in the near future.

Angular

Angular 9 is a major upgrade, with the most significant changes, including using the Ivy compiler and runtime by default and single page application. This change makes Angular bundles smaller and provides Angular with improvements in run time, debugging, type changes, and builds stability. In addition to the overall improvement in the Ivy compiler's performance, the latest version of Angular has faster build time since it enables ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation by default. The long-term effects of IVY on developer interest in Angular remain to be seen.

Angular has also been updated to work with TypeScript 3.6 and 3.7. Additional changes include an improved binding for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and improved internationalization. Furthermore, Angular v9 includes hundreds of bug fixes.

The most critical changes in future releases of Angular are likely to include improvements to Ivy, significantly reducing the bundle size and run time.

Aurelia 2

Aurelia 2 will be the next major version of Aurelia, which should be released shortly as of March 2020. This version retains all of Aurelia's current capabilities but improves them significantly. It still uses the same component model and syntax for binding and templating. The dependency injection (DI), compositional approach, and emphasis on standards are also unchanged in Aurelia 2, with rights reserved.

Latest Changes

Many of the changes in Aurelia 2 are improvements to existing tools, which are essential for a framework to be viable today. Aurelia 2 will work with bundlers and loaders more effectively since it follows the latest module loading standards. Several of these bundles and build tools are based on vanilla JS. Enhanced debugging tools in Aurelia 2 will also improve error messages, logging, and stack tracing.

Future Changes

Aurelia 2 takes a new approach to project scaffolding to make this process more comfortable than ever. Developers will no longer need to install an Aurelia-specific command-line interface (CLI) to build projects. They'll simply use Node.js to run npx, allowing them to generate a new project ready for deployment. No additional installations will be necessary.

The Aurelia 2 team also integrates Visual Studio (VS) into Aurelia 2 to improve its context-sensitivity, or IntelliSense, which is useful for functions like automatically completing attributes and binding expressions. Aurelia uses non-breaking templating syntax, so IntelliSense will also work in Aurelia. Developers also need comprehensive documentation of their framework as their projects grow, especially for design language and components. Aurelia 2's support for Storybook will help accomplish this requirement.

Summary

Angular and Aurelia are both front-end frameworks for modern application development. They also support third-party tools, allow the integration of existing applications, and abide by rights reserved regulations. The best choice depends on the parameters the developing organization values most, including community support and security. The ease of resolving technical problems with application and component functionality is also an important factor in choosing between Angular and Aurelia.

The most obvious difference to non-developers between the two frameworks is that Angular has a more extensive user base and community, primarily due to Google's backing. However, Aurelia is more stable than Angular, so Aurelia would be preferable in high-end applications where quality and security have great value. On the other hand, Angular may be preferable when the application size is small, but the rate of requests is high.

At Baytech Consulting, a custom web application development company, we have completed many Angular and Aurelia projects. Overall, we use Aurelia when given a choice.