We need to make some noise!

21

Before all, as a developer I love Aurelia and its simple yet sensible architecture and its adherence to standards. All Aurelia maintainers and contributors deserve a huge thank you.

I am not a contributor so all I say is under this disclaimer. [Un]fortunately my paid job is full time+ and therefore all my experience with Aurelia is in my scarce free time.

In my job we are developing with Angular. It was an inheritance from previous developers and I learned it on the go. In all honesty I’m not crazy about Angular, but having been developing with it for 5 years I can say that I have very high confidence in Angular, its backers, and the community.

They publish a major version twice a year like clockwork, and in between minor versions with enhancements and bug fixes. Also their migration path from one major version to the next is clear and I have never had serious issues resulting from migration. My productivity is also good.

Their official documentation is not the best in the market, but there are so many written and videoed blogs that I feel I’m fully covered (borrowing from testing jargon).

When selecting anything, be it a framework or a 3rd party npm package, I believe most of us evaluate the options based on the parameters everyone listed in this thread. Namely, frequency of releases, documentation, repo stars, references, etc. On top of the quality of the product itself. We are all programmed to think alike more or less.

Sadly I would not select Aurelia for the company I work for. It’s a startup and like all startups should execute with risk management always on its mind. And this is where Angular (in my case) beats Aurelia.

In a big and solid company where I would feel I could afford to be more experimental, I would definitely advocate and promote Aurelia.

2 Likes
22

Aurelia is too good, there are not enough questions on slackOverflow and consort, so visibility!
In fact, even on Twitter we don’t talk about it (yet it is a very vector of techno communication in France). I think his problem is communication, there is none (good or bad)!
Here in France in Bordeaux, the devs don’t want to get tired of looking at a new framework, they are more on "I use the hype frameworks (Angular, React, Vue.js)
Maybe we should organize inter-site links, novelties, use cases, re-tweets, goodies?
When do you think ?

2 Likes
23

Once you get a hang of it, it mostly just works, so yeah, there’s not gonna be too many questions on Stack Overflow. Thus, we need to engage with the community in another way.

24

Always make a good product with good documentation with lots of examples.

When you announce an Au2, first get it to perfection in alpha (though you don’t want to make perfect the enemy of the good). People will adopt it. Trust me, I’m not here because React and Angular are so easy. I’m here because they’re not.

I’m gonna give you a snippet from React for today, just to show you how horrible it is:

this.handleChange = this.handleChange.bind(this);
    this.handleSubmit = this.handleSubmit.bind(this);

Obvious = obvious.bind (to obviously this).

And if that wasn’t obvious enough, 10 lines down there’s another:

 onChange={this.handleChange} />

obvious change = handle obvious changes?

“but these frameworks, they work well…” Oh yeah? So does jQuery. So does vanilla javascript, and why did someone need to make Svelte 3? Well people liked the simplicity of it and it was 4kb I guess…

Au2 is on the right path, just needs to make sure not to overengineer or overcomplicate it.

25

Despite being one of the best frameworks since it debuted in January 2015, Aurelia has always been the underdog. So, there will always be a degree of, “Why not React?”, “Why not Vue?” — I believe Svelte is in the same situation as Aurelia right now. It had some great initial noise and interest, but you’re not seeing Svelte take over as much as people thought it would. Despite this, Svelte continues to be loved by its smaller community and the same thing can be said for Aurelia.

My advice to anyone wanting to advocate for Aurelia is to start talking about it. I’ve always made this statement which is rooted in truth: Developers are too efficient using Aurelia to talk about it.

If you are building cool applications and projects with Aurelia, a blog post (even better if it’s an official company blog post) followed by a share to sites like Product Hunt, Hacker News and so forth will really help with its visibility. In my biased opinion, Aurelia has consistently beaten other frameworks and libraries with its superior developer experience and following of web standards for several years now.

Make no mistake, the core team are here each and every day working on Aurelia. It’s no surprise that v2 has taken longer than anticipated. We’ve been delayed by a few things beyond our control, many core team members have families and despite the world opening back up, COVID is still around and a real threat to the health and safety of people.

As for fighting for Aurelia, I’ll share a tip that has helped me over the past seven years to get Aurelia on top of the pile for framework choice: make a demo. If you ask for permission to use Aurelia or go the more traditional route, you’ll be bogged down by whataboutisms and comparisons to more popular options. Show your team, stakeholders and clients why Aurelia is superior.

One thing I often love to do is demo a feature in React and Aurelia. Sometimes it can be hard for people to understand if you explain something to them, but showing them why Aurelia is better even most non-technical people can understand that (less code, easier to read, HTML and Javascript).

Also, I highly recommend anyone starting a new Aurelia project to use Aurelia 2. Despite it not being officially released yet, I’ve been using it for two years and updating as it is improved. All you have to do is type: npx makes aurelia — then follow the prompts to scaffold a v2 project.

One thing that we would absolutely love for the community to do (if you can) is start migrating and building with it.

10 Likes
26

This is exactly what we do. Everybody agrees, that Aurelia is technologically impressive – and then goes with Angular because Aurelia does not show up on any radar and therefore poses too big of a risk in the eyes of the decision makers.

  • Will it be around tomorrow? We always argue that there is a good sized core team working on it, that it’s unofficially backed by Microsoft to some degree and that it has been around for quite some time now, but as long as it is not officially backed by Microsoft and not showing up on StateOfJS or similar, it’s hard to argue.
  • Will we find developers for it? We then explain that the learning curve is much flatter for Aurelia, that you can take any decent developer and get them up to speed in days. But since everybody “knows” Angular or React on paper, that argument is lost again… even with one of our clients who failed to staff a React project was they simply couldn’t find anyone for the job.
  • What’s the release path of Aurelia 2? Here we’re running out of arguments. Looking at the commit history and reading now that Rob is not working on it either anymore surely does not help.

So again, from my POV, the only way to get Aurelia to become a viable option for the decision makers is to give it the visibility it deserves.

  • Handle the questions on StackOverflow instead of this forum
  • Publish a road map for Aurelia 2
  • Relaunch the website for Aurelia 2 to give it more sex appeal
  • Internalise the many good tutorials that are out there so that new devs find the solution to there problem quickly
  • Have a real showcase site
  • Create a YouTube with tutorials and comparisons. Many years ago I saw Robs speech where he compared frameworks on YouTube and this is what got me to look at Aurelia in the first place as I had never heard of it before.
  • Make some noise! Don’t just happily know that Aurelia is better while dying a slow death.
5 Likes
27

I recently posted both here and on Twitter about the fact that I was able to single handedly build a social network with Aurelia. The whole process took me 4 years to finish.

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28

I’m confused as to whether it’s suitable for production use or not. If it is, what precisely does it mean to be in alpha?

1 Like
29

Aurelia and FAST aren’t solving the same problem, are they? I thought they were complementary.

30

You know how it happens… one thing leads to another… (-:

31

FAST was started as purely a collection of UI components. But MS saw its potential, now it’s getting a router which is unsurprisingly similar to Aurelia v1’s router. They are trying to grow it up and replace React usage in MS.

2 Likes