Local Support -- AngularJS about localsupport HOT 5 CLOSED

During my brief experience with Local Support, I noticed that the organization index page fetches all the organizations information, everything you would need for the show page. A SPA would in fact help optimize the app because you reduce the number of times you need to go back to the server and fetch information (because you already have everything in the index page to begin with). Local Support is actually a great app to switch to a SPA, because it will be much easier to integrate information from other sources (such as Events and Volunteering opportunities) without having to reload another 500 records worth of JSON. Also, as @johnnymo87 mentioned, the application is easier to be made more interactive, updating the map from the search box or updating the search box from the map, this two way interactivity is much easier to achieve on the client side than dealing with complex routes on the server. Not sure how this plays in with the current direction of Local Support, but I still think this would be a good idea.

The only issue I see with this approach is developer resources, at the moment we do not have many developers who are competent with angular, hopefully this will change in the future (front-end frameworks are probably the next biggest thing after Rails, so any developer should invest the time to learn it!). I am integrating angular with Codealia, as the project matures, I expect to see more people in Agile Ventures competent in angular.

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This would indeed work well as a single page app (SPA).

I am concerned about Local Support's commitment to support older browsers, which AngularJS doesn't. I think we want IE7 and later to work. AngularJS 2 will drop support for IE9 afaik.

Instead of a wholesale migration to a single page, the interactive features you mentioned could be provided by AJAX, with, I imagine, better progressive enhancement. I offer no opinion on whether Rails AJAX or AngularJS SPA would be more difficult to engineer or maintain.

from localsupport.

Rails AJAX can get pretty messy very quickly, a framework like Angular will encourage developers to write better code, as opposed to giving them too much freedom. However the issue with older browser support is a legitimate concern, if the client wants older browser support, we will have to fall back to Rails AJAX. On a different note, did anybody actually test LocalSupport in older IE?

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We don't have to upgrade to Angular 2 when it comes out if we don't want to.

from localsupport.

well no, but there is still a question of how far back we want to support. Any inputs in light of the above arguments @tansaku?

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