Most of us here know many good reasons why we work with Aurelia instead of Angular or React. But decision makers (shockingly both from business and development) simply look at the numbers on https://stateofjs.com and Aurelia is off the table! Time and again we're presenting Aurelia as superior technology for a project, everybody agrees that is clean and interesting and then picks Angular as technology because Google returns more hits. This is so frustrating. But apparently Microsoft (if they are still backing the project?) does not care about this? So my question is: Can _we_ do something about this?
For instance: How about if we would urge people to ask their questions on Stackoverflow instead of this forum here? Because hits on Stackoverflow is also a popular metric to decide on how “good” a framework is.
Also, of course it would help if Aurelia v2 would see the light of day. Having the new big release in the pipeline for years and not getting it ready does not lift the confidence a product either.
If you should have a good tactic on how to convince the decision makers that clean code, good standards compliance, easy getting-started path is more important than 184 different image gallery extensions to choose from, then please let me know!
I always felt Aurelia would be a great choice for Microsoft to adopt given that it was created by a famous and talented .NET developer. At least in my mind, this was a way to get a lot of eye balls, especially the ones in enterprise development. It would become a great choice for architects given its DX. But it wasn’t meant to be, I guess.
Rob has been working for MS on the FAST UI. It now starts to grow more and more into a full featured framework.
I asked Rob the same question why MS didn’t just adopt Aurelia, but created FAST instead. Rob answered:
Aurelia doesn't meet the requirements.
1st req was 100% web components.
2nd req was 10kb or less library size.
Basically, needed to be very small and all web components.
MS really cared about the size, but not much the feature set. They value page loading time above anything else (market/sells driven I guess).
I don’t know about that. I use StackOverflow for looking up useful answers, but I get hit by the poor quality of recent questions asked there. Sometimes I think that people are not able to apply some common sense or do some investigation of their own. Instead, they just dump their duplicate questions on StackOverflow despite the fact that a few simple G**gle-queries can answer those questions within minutes. Quite frustrating. So I am moving away from Stack Overflow when it comes to asking and answering questions there…
For Aurelia-related questions and answers, I personally prefer to use this Discourse forum instead. Everything that is related to Aurelia is in one place and the quality of the material here is profound. I think that moving to StackOverflow won’t be an improvement in that regard.
This is disturbing news. Besides the technical stuff (which decision makers don’t care much about anyway) was the only selling point we had “Former Angular core team member is working on it for Microsoft”. Now that this is gone and the remaining Aurelia does not seem to be able to release Aurelia vNext any time soon, I’m really running out of arguments here…
One can always propose to decision makers to create a prototype in several technologies. And have a discussion on pros and cons.
It won’t be easy. But one might hope and one might win.
Noise vs cargo cult is ineffective.
But…
To make noise one could build Teams alike using Aurelia that will not lag and be awesome (-:
@huochunpeng do you have a roadmap for the official release? I mean once it was mentioned that it will be released by Christmas, but 5 more months are over by now and there is not even a beta release.
That is a main criteria for customers at the moment, since they would maybe migrate to aurelia, but if they need to make the major migration after the migration to aurelia, it’s just to much, and they will chose another framework. However, if the release date would be known, this would make the choice for au2 possible.
Also a new blog with the roadmap would be great
Been there, done that. Everybody agreed that Aurelia is technically interesting. Still, at the end of the day, Angular/React was chosen, because everyone already had heard of those frameworks, and because they are “backed by big companies”. Now, reading what @huochunpeng said above just took away our “but Aurelia is backed by Microsoft!”-argument. Tough times!
I’ve single-handedly built an enterprise-level social network with v1. It’s more than capable and v2 is just a cherry on top. We need to make people understand that.
Waiting for v2 is not going to change anything because we already have the technically most impressive product out there. Adding more of that to the equation, isn’t going to improve Aurelia’s standing with the dev community.
It’s about engaging with devs directly at different venues and demonstrating what Aurelia can do in the real world is what migh help us get traction.
@mario.stopfer I couldn’t agree more. But again: While the techies that we can convince to spend some time on Aurelia are generally really impressed, everyone still has serious doubts, if Aurelia will still be around 3-5 years down the road. This has nothing to do with its technical capabilities. It has to do with how the organisation is perceived. As long as Aurelia the technically best framework, but flying under the radar, Aurelia will have the same faith as Betamax.
That’s why I said we need to make some noise. I hate to say it, but “marketing” should probably be the prime focus for the Aurelia team.
All questions and the very quick and helpful answers of the Aurelians on Stackoverflow instead of some hidden forum
A better roadmap, more releases, showing that Aurelia is alive and well
More, better official tutorials
And getting MS to become an official backer would make a huge difference
Oh, that comparison to Betamax got to me! You’re pretty much spot on.
It’s honestly all about marketing at this point. We need to mention Vue as well. I don’t think it had a backing from anyone when it started out, so Aurelia can stand its ground without MS, which let’s be honest, isn’t very likely to come in the near future. So looking at how Vue got to where its at, should give us some clue to the roadmap to broader adoption.
Engagement of the core dev Aurelia team with the users is a must, I agree. Another thing is the first impression for many people. The current Aurelia website is fine, and that’s the problem, because “just fine” is not good enough.
Many people will perceive it as an outdated framework just by the look and feel of the website. If there is some time, the team should really revamp the current website and make it more in line with what other frameworks are offering.
The website is fine enough, there are other reasons that the framework will lose against the other competitioners, even if it’s great:
Low number of releases (e.g. v1 had 2 releases 2 months ago, and before there where 4 years without any release (at least for the aurelia-framework package)
No relase/roadmap on the page
vNext still in alpha
last but not least, the combination of the focus on vNext, more or less no v1 release and the duration of the vNext release process
I know you guys are doing great stuff and I can’t wait for v2 to be officially released, but the missing information and the reduced commits/outcome don’t help in convincing other devs to use aurelia
So yes, marketing is a key point but the choice where to start with the marketing also.
How many times did you have to refactor your React, Vue or Angular app because of breaking changes?
Or spend time on adopting new version of webpack?
(-:
Or put it another way: what have you done for The framework?
Just implemented one Angular app, and migrated one react-app to aurelia
With aurelia I never had problems with the version.
But to be honest, do you select a framework, if you see that no release happened within the last three years? aurelia-dependency-injection - npm
Or if a major release is in progress, but you don’t find out a possible release date, or a road-map?
I’m sorry, but I can understand if a developer don’t want to start developing the app with v1, if they know that v2 can be released within the next months, but maybe also years? that would mean to migrate the app to v1, and then perform the next migration to v2 which means they would required to migrations, and can’t provide any benefit to the customer with those migrations, since the migrations don’t contain any features for the end-user.
And the pain in the angular migration was v1 to v2, with the new half-annual major releases, they hopefully have reduced the number of breaking changes…
You need to puth things in the right context. We are both already sold on Aurelia and don’t care what the website looks like. But to prospective future users, it matters a lot. They still haven’t decided and many people will decide just based on the first look alone.
The first look being, the actual project’s homepage obviously. So, yes, something should be done about it.
Now, to your point about there being no communication between Aurelia core dev team and the public and also the low number of releases. I would actually put this as the no. 1 problem because no developer is going to choose a project which he thinks isn’t going to be supported a year into his upcoming development.
So yes, the devs need to communicate the progress a lot better. I’m sure they have done an enormous amount of work on v2, but if nobody knows about it, its as if nothing has been done. And so, the impression that Aurelia is a dying project comes about.
Isn’t that what the the down-vote button is for in StackOverflow?
