Making Aurelia's Binding Engine more Accessible

Me and a few others recently convinced our company to move forward with our plans to update our application to use the Aurelia framework. The only serious issue we encountered was convincing the department that Aurelia’s low adoption rate was not a sign that it would be out of support in the near future. It is unfortunate but Aurelia is behind, in the great framework race and it isn’t because it is inferior to the alternatives.

I am in love with the Aurelia framework. But I believe the name Aurelia is actually hindering its adoption. It is very difficult to spell Aurelia correctly without seeing it written first. It is also surprisingly easy to accidentally say Angular instead of Aurelia when you are discussing the two frameworks.

For these reasons I believe that Aurelia would benefit from repackaging it’s binding engine into a new, smaller and more accessible product called: Saber.js - A product suitable for smaller projects, portfolios, codepens and jsfiddles. It would compete more directly with frameworks like Handlebars.js, Knockout.js and Vue.js - Saber.js would be easier to market. It would be easier to spell and thus easier to search for online. It could potentially reach a larger developer base which would drive more interest and confidence in the Aurelia framework.

Does anyone else think this is a decent idea?

*Edit
I changed the name of the post to better reflect my question.

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From the title, i guess you suggested renaming aurelia-binding to saber ? Or did you mean saber-binding ?

I think prefixing aurelia libs with aurelia isn’t bad. Plus, we have precedence, like Java and JavaScript. People will get used to it :smile:

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No, I am suggesting that Aurelia is a terrible name for marketing purposes. I have seen it first hand at my company. I had to send links to several developers after our conversations about the framework because they weren’t able to spell Aurelia well enough to google it themselves. That is a serious problem.

Therefore I am recommending that Aurelia create a new and smaller product modeled after Vue.js or Handlebars.js that effectively repackages the Aurelia binding engine with a name that is easier to Market. “Saber.js” was merely a suggestion (I was under the impression that both Aurelia and its predecessor Durandal were named after sabers) and I thought that name could work.

This idea would in effect create a brand new product, with the goal of building a larger (but separate) community that would support the Aurelia community. Saber would be to Aurelia, what Knockout was to Durandal.

This is not about naming conventions. This is about product marketing and Aurelia’s low adoption rate. I think this idea would help tremendously.

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HJC as in html, javascript, css… (-:
eSBee as standards based (-:

@gooeyideas you have the point there. My colleagues were not able to pronounce it as well.

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@HamedFathi, you disagree? In your opinion why do you think that Aurelia’s adoption rate is so low?

There are over 700 thousand websites powered by React js and even more than that powered by Angular. By contrast there are only 850 sites using Aurelia. These are the statistics that my colleagues threw in our faces when we proposed using the Aurelia framework. I was astounded by those numbers and I thought that the site they found them on must be wrong, but every site (that I found) which compares framework usage totes similar statistics.

Aurelia adoption rate makes it a difficult sell for any development project. I highly doubt that it would be my post that drives a developer away from the framework. We had to fight to prove that using Aurelia was the best choice for our product. I want the Aurelia community to grow and I made this post because I think a smaller product, with the same binding engine, and an easier to google name would be good for the community. If you don’t agree I would like to know why.

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Definitely I am disagree with your point of view.
Any framework has some problems. after 1 year working with Aurelia I think it has a problem just one: Documentations
Specially in advanced topics, I believe for beginners currect docs are great but for advanced situations are not. we need more docs with more details not a new name.
So If someone dont choose Aurelia that is because they dont find resources for some scenarios. Most of the time Aurelia supports that features but docs are not enough. Of course they found them in Vue or Angular,… . I think Aurelia core team should focus on advanced topics in future too. However I know they are working hard to make Aurelia even better. I must say thanks for everything.

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You believe that documentation for advanced topics is the main reason why Aurelia is not powering over 700 thousand web sites?

*edit
I believe this google trends report, points to the more likely culprit:
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=react,angular,aurelia

Yes because Aurelia is full-stack framework and has any features developers want.
In most of the features is the best. In performance is great. In syntax in simplicity in… is great too.
So I think great docs that cover most scenarios is the key.

https://discourse.aurelia.io/t/aurelia-advanced-topics

If you check the topics in that link you can find great docs for each one in other frameworks but in Aurelia not.

Lets cool down here a bit. @gooeyideas your point about adoption rates is definitely true, no matter which way you look at it. But so it is for tons of other great frameworks like Mythril, Svelte or others. I highly doubt its the name that is causing that, allthough I see that the latin name might cause spelling troubles. Its corporate backing like Facebook or Google, or in the case of Vue large chinese companies and the Laravel crowd, that mainly drive adoption. We havent been able to find such a backer. So if there is something wrong its marketing. Good news is that the recently launched patreon campaign is perceived very well and give us resources to tackle this problem. We’ll work on that.

Btw Durandal is a sword and Aurelia means golden or enshined from its original latin meaning. :wink:

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d@zewa666, corporate backing may account for the popularity of Angular, React, Vue and a few others but there are a few popular frameworks that do not benefit from a corporate sponsorship that do very well. And they all have a few things in common: they are easy to google, they are easy to implement and they don’t require as much time to learn and use.

I think the point of this post was lost somewhere. Aurelia is like an enterprise level product. It does everything you could ever need it to do and it does it better than anyone else. However, if I want to put together a codepen or jsfiddle prototype that uses the Aurelia’s binding engine I can only do so because I asked how here and got a somewhat hacky solution. If I wanted to build a simple widget with handlebars.js, I could select the framework from a quick add dropdown and my codepen is ready to go.

I do believe your name hurts your ability to market your framework (but whether or not you agree, you are stuck with the name Aurelia, it has grown on me so please don’t change it). I also believe that the lack of codepens and jsfiddle examples built in Aurelia hurts more. And the fact that Aurelia is almost overkill for the task of building a small portfolio site or any other simple project hurts the most.

The Aurelia team could build another product (my company will be using the full version of Aurelia so please know that this is not a post campaigning for selfish gains). This post was supposed to be about the creation of a smaller product built on the existing Aurelia binding engine. Call it what you want so long as people can spell it and it only requires a single cdn to use. I made my original post because I thought this hypothetical product would help the community grow.

@gooeyideas could you share the company name / project you are going to build using Aurelia?