In 2019, how much is it necessary to migrate a site from Angularjs to another framework?

Question

I'm a project manager of a market place and I'm trying to find solution for my concerns. For two years a ago we decided to develop market place. In front layer we decide to use angularjs and our team professional implement front layer using AngularJS. We add dependency injection for first time to angularjs 1.3 and solve google analytic crawling in SPA website. But when google announce On July 1, 2018 AngularJS entered a 3 year Long Term Support period. As a project manager I have a big concern because We living in 2019 and after two years whats happen for our website ?

But my biggest question is how optimistic how long can we use Angularjs? how much migration is necessary for this framework and Is it possible that the sites written with Angularjs are not able to work after 2021?

Answer 1

• For Angularjs support, you can find the previous discussion on this portal: angularjs 1.x support lifecycle and end-of-life

• And the question regarding migration, in my personal opinion migration is a better option as the latest Angular version provides Boost in performance, Mobile-driven approach, code Maintainability & optimization, and most importantly Reduced development time and costs with better support. And if asked about the migration approach, I would suggest a complete re-write that can be the most cost-effective strategy. If you’re a manager, put your team through Angular training (live, online, videos, books). Allocate time and budget for getting your developers up to speed with Angular as the learning curve is steep and prior experience with AngularJS is not overly helpful. Then your developers will write the new version of the app as per best practices recommended for Angular/TypeScript projects. And finally, it’ll definitely pay off in the end. And, secondly, the newer versions of Angular won’t let you systems become outdated or irrelevant.

• There is a team called XLTS.dev who are providing extended support for AngularJS beyond December 2021.

Answer 2

The change is only about "support" and it means, no more bug fixes and no more improvements. Other than that, everything will be the same. Although, you should consider some disaster scenarios after LTS.

I saw some posts about running AngularJS and Angular side by side and I think it can be a good solution for your problem. Since you have enough time to migrate, your team can develop new features on Angular and you can also maintain your current AngularJS. Eventually you can get rid of AngularJS depending on your project size and development capacity.

Please check these scenarios.

• Running AngularJS 1.6 in Angular 5 (side by side)
• Running Angular and AngularJS frameworks side by side

Answer 3

I am AngularJS developer and I do continue to use this framework for some of my projects. I am aware that in not too distant future this library will be completely outdated (as some of you can say it's the case now), however:

• AngularJS ecosystem gives you still lots of choice/support (as framework is very mature)
• my main libraries as ag-grid, highChart or others, help to build great apps out of the box with little time
• I still do enjoy to work with this framework for it's simplicity and flexibility

If you should build brand new app I would recommend React or Vue (or other framework) especially if you do not have significant experience with Angularjs. However if Angularjs is not new for you, you need to go fast - just use your experience and go for Angular.

Taking into account what you wrote:

My main concern is after 3 years of support. Whether after the 3 year end of support, Angularjs sites can continue to work without problems

Angularjs apps won't just stop to work like that, from one day to another. As your project requires long-term maintenance, needs to be built from scratch and will take lots of effort - Angularjs ecosystem is then probably not the best choice for you (I do insist "for you").

Answer 4

We have used Angular JS extensively in our company for enterprise projects, mobile applications and continue to use it. Google's decision to stop development of AngularJS and put it on a EOL will definitely make developers to panic. But 3 years to migrate away from it is a long time and you can plan accordingly.

If your plan is to migrate to Angular, then you can follow their official guide to upgrade using ngUpgrade. You can find numerous articles online that explain how they upgraded existing AngularJS apps to Angular.

If your plan is to consider migrating to a totally new framework, then this will involve some work. You should take a look Web Components spec. Your existing directives/components can be re-written, with less effort, as web components (shadow DOM) or custom components (without shadow DOM). There are libraries that help you write these generic components - supported on most browsers today - Stencil JS, lit element and a few others.

The advantage of using Stencil JS is that it provides tools to compile your web components to target different frameworks (Angular, React, Vue, Ember).

The latter solution seems feasible as it allows you to migrate directives one by one over a period of time, without having to re-write the whole application in one go. In the future you can also re-use your components in the framework of your choice.

As for your question about will it continue to work after 2021 - yes it will continue to work. The problems you might face might not really be of technical nature, but related to hiring resources to work on it or maintain it.

Answer 5

Google announced:

All AngularJS applications that work now, will continue to work in the future. All published versions of AngularJS, on npm, bower, CDNs, etc will continue to be available.

For more information, see

• Angular Blog - Stable AngularJS and Long Term Support
• AngularJS Version Support Status

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It’s out of date now, and new projects should absolutely not be built using it. This isn’t to say it was ever a particularly great choice. AngularJS came out of nowhere and became popular by default, rather than because it had particularly great design. It has a difficulty curve better suited to a great roller coaster than a decent framework, and a bunch of weird architectural and terminology choices. What the hell is a $scope, anyway? And what is a directive? What does transclusion actually mean? Meaningless terms that AngularJS has created. AngularJS does some things that are fundamentally wrong, such as creating invalid attributes on HTML markup. Even Google doesn’t use Angular for their own apps, like Gmail, and there’s a reason for that.

In fairness, AngularJS was always a poor choice. Its idiosyncratic code means that unlike other frameworks, it’s not good at implementing an agnostic, javascript solution. AngularJS code looks unfamiliar to anyone not super experienced with the weird intricacies of AngularJS itself.

Thankfully, this decision is well made for you – AngularJS is now quite thoroughly dead, and only legacy projects will continue to be using it. We should be grateful for what AngularJS has given us, and respect the position it held, but we should be just as pleased that it’s gone.¹