What you say to someone who says Aurelia is dead and we need to move on to a new framework?
How would you address these points?
I would say that au1 is still better then all other āmodern frameworksā.
I donāt speak on behalf of everyone else in the team, so my perspective will differ.
Just like larger companies with larger development teams, everyone has been affected by the lockdowns, restrictions and changing landscape around the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the perceived slowness, a lot of work has been done in 2021. Work on Aurelia 2 has been done in the middle of the pandemic. Weāve improved our communication and have a tried and tested release process, which has resulted in the alpha being very stable.
As for Aurelia 1, itās a solid framework many are using in production. I have apps that have been in production since 2016 that never die. I would love to know what people mean when they say āindustry standardsā because Aurelia is one of the most standards abiding frameworks around. Because Aurelia is just primarily HTML and Javascript, there are very few instances I can think of where Aurelia doesnāt work with emerging standards. The only turbulence with Aurelia 1 was Webpack 5, a tooling situation, not exactly a framework one. I know many projects had the same difficulties with Webpack 5.
I am biased, but Iāve found that Aurelia has had the most effortless onboarding and learning curve of any other framework. The only comparable simplicity is Svelte, and Svelte is a library, not a fully-fledged framework like Aurelia.
Development is also slower because we want to ensure very few differences between Aurelia 1 and 2. We want to avoid a situation like Angular faced where they dumped an entirely new version of Angular and offered no easy migration path. While Aurelia 2 retains many familiar parts, developers love; convention over configuration, intuitive templating, flexible binding system.
Iām writing from the perspective of an Aurelia VSCode Extension contributor.
For me personally, good learning ressources are super important.
This is why we aim to make the extension be a companion on your Aurelia journey, that can give you helpful hints.
While the Extension is nowhere near eg. Vetur, we are lucky, to be able to draw a lot of inspiration from them (eg. āVirtual Typescript fileā to support completions in your View files).
Currently, we are in process of preparing a v2.10 release.
I know, that the we are not very transparent around the feature set of the Extension, but in my case, I wanted to focus just on the code (modularize, well-tested, easily extensible, easy to use), before announcing half-baked features.
But to use this opportunity, Iād still like to sneak-peak a little feature (almost-done-baked):
Aurelia 2 is so cool.
Unfortunately Rob made what I felt was a fundamental mistake when he started Aurelia. He decided to make it completely unopinionated as far as the loaders were concerned, so we had a framework where the first thing a user was confronted with was a choice of six loaders, and most non-core modules (and some core ones) had a nightmare scenario where they supported some loaders but not others.
Angular took a simpler approach, choosing WebPack and standardising on TypeScript, meaning new adopters had a single documented process, so even a complete novice was able to get up and running quickly.
We also had a complete lack of centralised community support. We used Gitter, which was fantastic for āI need help right now!ā situations, but had a useless search system and no way of pinning extremely useful and relevant answers to common problems, so while I was banging on about either setting up a forum of some sort to let us assign moderators to flag and collect the hidden gems and FAQs, Angular 2+ shot ahead, as it was years before this discourse forum was created.
As a result of this we missed the peak adoption period, despite having a significantly better framework, fantastic community, and significantly better core modules for real-world tasks such as validation and I8N.
I still like Aurelia most. Iām not doing a lot of web development currently, but every time I have to look at a customerās Angular or React solution I shudder, and I still see Aurelia as a single shining example of what can be done if you focus on structured convention based solutions instead of Angularās death-by-attributes or Reactās fluffy code-in-html approach.
I do struggle when I talk to clients about options to develop an app. If I push for Aurelia will they look it up and laugh at its lack of presence? If we do adopt it, will we be able to find developers who can switch from Angular to Aurelia quickly enough for our timeline?
So Aurelia isnāt dead, but the productās focus on geekiness and not on real-world definitely hurt it. Letās be honest, React.JS is an example of how you can take an awful system and get mass adoption by making the onboarding process simple. I believe that if Aurelia had been targetted at beginners in the same way, it would have had a huge take-up and be far bettter known 
On the plus side, every single popular web framework goes stale within 12-24 months. Angular is losing popularity, so I would say that if you feel you can trust that Aurelia will still be supported, it is as good a choice as most of the others. While the loaders were broken daily in the early days, Aurelia 1ās core and binding concepts remained pretty damn stable, and the main changes have been to add features that make it easier and more convention based, unlike almost all other frameworks where they seem to rewrite their whole model every couple of years.
What you say to someone who says Aurelia is dead and we need to move on to a new framework?
Which framework? Do we randomly choose a āflavor of the monthā product and see if it still exists in a recognisable form next year?
- Aurelia 2 has been very slow in coming
Yep, I suspect because it keeps chasing changing trends and expectations
- Aurelia 1 is not keeping up with industry standards
Yep, I suspect because it doesnāt bother chasing changing trends and expectations
- Hiring and onboarding is difficult because of the lack of community and learning resources
The community in here is good, with questions answered very quickly and completely, but this is a small site, and nothing like your typical Angular community.
Learning resources are the real killer. Aurelia has always been plagued with situations where a simple āHello Worldā example breaks because Node is the wrong sub-version or a loader needs some weird nuance, meaning potential new users simply delete it and move to React.
@dwaynecharrington wrote an Aurelia book which had lots of real-world examples of how to develop applications for the real world, and we need more āCookbookā solutions out there to guide people.
Show me a site with a set of up-to-date examples I could give to my son so he could start coding simple applications today. I can find hundreds of React or Angular ones, but Iād love to see some quality Aurelia ones.
I agree with a lot of what @jsobell says. It is hard to justify aurelia based on how other popular frameworks are measured like react, vue, etc. We also have a ton of apps that have been running aurelia for the past 5+ years and have had little to no āaureliaā framework issues. However, Iāve learned not to judge aurelia like other frameworks since itās not like other frameworks.
I always balk at anyone that says itās hard to find (or I need) āaurelia devsā as the framework is easy enough you just need a good JS dev and one can be up and running with aurelia (and your own teams code style) in less than 2 weeks (less if they are a good dev). Iāve trained a ton of generalists (full stack) devs on how to use aurelia and everyone of them have been up and running and being productive within the first week. Itās a true testament to how well aurelia was designed (convention over configuration) and keeping it very standards based.
We have no plans to stop using aurelia although we have started working with VueJS for smaller apps that donāt need a full SPA framework; mainly for quick, single view projects. I DO NOT like having to use build tools and specially NPM (always issues, all the time, with everyone) so if I donāt need all the features of a full framework, I tend to opt for a drop in option like Vue.
TBH though, I do worry at times that Rob is full time on another project, FAST, which is a great framework and you can see his hands all over the code. I went with aurelia based on his insight and design for a frameworkā¦BUTā¦I donāt see that changing really with the current aurelia team so I still feel confident in continuing developing with aurelia.
Thatās my 2 cents anyways.
Aurelia seems healthy for me.
Nice community support, steady progress of V2, and stable V1. Iām happy with Aurelia.
I love Aurelia. But recently I am looking at HTML over the wire options like HTMX, unpoly
I confirm, Aureliaās learning curve is very small: 1 day to do something, 1 week to better master advanced concepts. Whereas Angular or React requires at least 1 week minimum.
All the trainees in my company are trained in Aurelia, JavaScript, css / less, html and Java, hence my little statistics 
Aurelia is indeed very stable, the applications developed with this framework still work with little customer feedback (apart from new functionality)
In development, we have few bugs or misunderstandings due to the framework.
For my part, I like the ācliā which allows to have an application skeleton and a builder (webpack) operational in less than 5 minutes.
The documentation is good, even if there is something missing (in particular on the V2 beta).
Maybe some basic HTML components are missing as well?
In France, as soon as I talk about Aurelia, everyone looks at me with big eyes. They all believe that there is only Angular and React!
I regret that we do not wait more to talk about Aurelia on social networks (Twitter in particular) but this is perhaps due to the fact that the developers have fewer problems there than under Angular / react
To the Aurelia team, if you post tweets, I will repost them and translate them into French ā¦
Great tutorials will be key. When I go through tutorials on competitors they are OK but takes a while to do them.
I need basic things usually: (1) setup/install (2) SSR or SEO help (3) blog-like features (4) Routing (5) an HTTPS connector library to communicate with backend. (6) Conditions/loops/models/form components in html
Remember, few will remember Au1 if Au2 is amazing. The framework wars still have no golden star. I could roll a dice when deciding between Svelte, Vue, React, Angular, Aurelia. But I dread the few roadblocks that I may encounter.
How much would you laugh if I told you the current Angular tutorials/docs wonāt even load in Chrome?
I agree with ArchEnemy. Aurelia is great, hitting all the sweet spots. What it needs now is make a good impression.
I am trying to onboard Aurelia for the next project, but the above makes winning the team over hard. As well of course for newcomers to pick up this great project with huge potential.
At work I develop a very large Angular app. Itās so cumbersome and bloated, and Iāve been doing it for 6 years. About 6 years ago I started playing with Aurelia. A few small personal projects here and there. I just started two new personal projects, one of which will go live this year (hopefully in a couple months). Keep in mind that I only work on these personal projects on the weekends in my spare time. I can tell you that the time to market using au1 destroys ng2. Aurelia 1 is just so simple and well thought out. The only reason I havenāt switched to Au2 is because I need something production ready in 2 months, and Iām waiting for a migration guide (I just donāt have time to figure it out myself right now).
If I had to do it over again, I would have chosen Aurelia for the corporate application I work on. Unfortunately, everything was new to me and outside influence trumped our own internal experience. Any new apps will surely be Aurelia, especially if we can get Ionic integration.
I love this framework. Couple it with Hapi.js/node, and you really have the perfect ES full-stack solution.
Maybe some of you should come work with us where you can work on Aurelia full-time.
See Full-stack Position working with Aurelia
We have filled the position posted there, but we will likely be hiring throughout the year. So if youāre interested in chatting, shoot me an email or PM on this discord and send me your resume. We have a fun little Aurelia/python coding challenge that anyone here should be able to knock out of the park.
Iām working for a medium-sized company creating HR business software and weāre using Aurelia for our frontend.
We evaluated the known framework alternatives quite intensively and came to the conclusion that Aurelia (also in version 1) is simply miles ahead of the others in terms of simplicity and flexibility. Convention over Configuration creates so much less boilerplate and yet it is possible to implement even very complex requirements very easily.
We are fully convinced of Aurelia. Of course, we are also looking forward to version 2, as there are some cool new features. (shadow dom support, css file by convention, improved getter evaluation etc.)
But until then we are still fully satisfied with version 1.
I love Aurelia and am really excited about v2. However, it is very discouraging that Aurelia somehow never seems to make it āmainstreamā. For instance, I just started a new sandbox on CodePen.io (a site that the Aurelia team uses for its own code samples). CodePen opens a dialog with a number of Official Templates ā React, Vue, Angular, Typescript, etc. Aurelia is sadly missing!
The fact that the Aurelia name never seems to appear anywhere that the āmainstreamā names appear makes me wonder if Aurelia is always going to be a second-class citizen. I hope not ā but its dreadfully hard to convince people to use a system theyāve never heard of.
I noticed the exact same thing yesterday! I wanted to write a POC for aurelia-ui-virtualization and I had to come back to the docs and fork the Hello World example because there is no starting point for Aurelia on CodePen.
In case you donāt already know, there is a very well alternative to CodePen for Aurelia: