The Opinionated Advantage: A Personal Take
Opinionated frameworks, by their design, take a stand on the 'how' of development. This characteristic, in my personal view, translates into several tangible benefits:
- Efficiency and Consistency: Angular's pre-set conventions have, in my experience, streamlined teamwork and project onboardings, making development cycles noticeably faster and more cohesive if everyone follows Angular's intended approach to things.
- Best Practices Embedded: Personally, I've found Angular's integration of industry standards and best practices directly out of the box to be a significant time saver. This aspect has been especially beneficial in ensuring the robustness and scalability of both my work and personal projects without the added legwork.
- Reduced Decision Fatigue: On a personal note, Angular's 'opinionatedness' has freed me up to focus more on unique project challenges rather than getting bogged down by foundational decisions. This shift in focus has been instrumental in maintaining momentum and creativity under tight deadlines or complex requirements.
The "Bad" Side: Weighing the Trade-offs
As usual in the tech world, no solution comes without its trade-offs. For many, the primary concern with opinionated frameworks like Angular lies in their perceived lack of flexibility. It's true, Angular does prescribe certain ways of doing things, from project structure to specific implementation details. For some, this can feel like a straightjacket, stifling creativity and perhaps not aligning with every project's unique requirements, but in my case, being primarily a Backend engineer, having a proper set of ways to do things is appreciated.
Flexibility Concerns
From my perspective, as someone who has spent a significant portion of my career in backend development, the structured approach of Angular is less of a hindrance and more of a guiding force. Granted, if I were to dig into how routers or middleware operate in a PHP environment, I might have my preferences or opinions on how it's done. However, when it comes to the frontend realm— tasks such as implementing route guards in a Single Page Application (SPA)— I find the predefined ways of doing things helpful, reducing the amount of things I have to take care or learn outside my Backend expertise.
Performance Considerations
Another aspect often brought into question is performance. It's commonly argued that the comprehensive nature of frameworks like Angular can lead to heftier applications, potentially impacting load times and responsiveness. While it's undeniable that performance is a critical factor in user experience, I believe this is more about how the tools are used rather than an inherent flaw in the framework itself. Performance is invariably a case-to-case situation, hinging largely on the specific project requirements and the decisions made by developers. Angular offers ample opportunities for optimizing performance, from lazy loading modules to complex build processes to have a reasonable bundle size in the end.
Angular In Action: My Personal Perspective
Angular's structured approach has been a unifying force among diverse development teams in the company I work for, fostering predictability and resilience in our workflows. Meanwhile, on the personal project front, I've leveraged Angular's scalability and comprehensive tooling to bring ambitious ideas to life with more ease and speed than I thought possible. These experiences, wholly personal, underline the value I've found in leaning into opinionated frameworks.
Conclusion
From my standpoint, the 'opinionated' tag often assigned to frameworks like Angular isn't a limitation; it's a launchpad. The guidance and structure provided by such frameworks have, in my personal experience, streamlined development processes, infused projects with industry best practices that I was not even aware when first starting a project, and allowed for greater focus on innovation over implementation minutiae.
But, ultimately, the choice of technology stack, be it as opinionated as Angular or as flexible as a library like React, should align with the project needs, team expertise, and overall development strategy. Please don't slice a Pizza with a sawchain, use always the tool that make the most sense to you and your needs.
Found in:
Software Architecture