As of 2020, Slant ranks Aurelia frameworks third and Angular fifth when it comes to client-side JavaScript Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) frameworks. By emphasizing markup languages or specialized GUI code, the MVVM software architecture paradigm encourages the separation of GUI development from business logic. Data items are made available in this paradigm so that developers can easily control and display them for end users. In this comparison of Aurelia vs. Angular, we will focus on the following aspects:
Choice of Convention over Configuration
Aurelia’s development services benefit from a mindset that prioritizes “convention over configuration.” This kind of design ensures that Aurelia is not just accessible to new users but also doesn’t get in the way of the core team’s engineers. Instead of requiring complex setups like Angular, the Aurelia framework wants developers to adhere to a few simple guidelines. Since components may be built in the standard Typescript and JavaScript frameworks, Aurelia’s syntax is also more approachable.
The main team working on Aurelia may now concentrate on application logic rather than fixing bugs in the Aurelia framework. Developers can create Aurelia components without annotating them with a decorator or providing information, for example. Many of these concerns are handled automatically by Aurelia if the developer follows certain basic rules. Since Aurelia developers can devote more time to business logic, the framework’s development time is much shorter than Angular’s.
With Aurelia, developers may create apps in whatever manner they see fit, unconstrained by rigid design conventions or restrictions. The modular nature of Aurelia makes it easier for developers to swap out certain components should the need arise.
Standards Conformity
Aurelia supports both established and new web standards without any modifications needed. Regarding adhering to these guidelines, Angular needs to catch up to the rest of the industry. Compared to Angular, Aurelia libraries are more neutral since they mostly consist of standard JS and TS classes. With Aurelia, developers can simply switch between implementations and test their code without losing the business focus.
One of the most immediately apparent places where Angular’s lack of compliance has repercussions for developers is case sensitivity. Aurelia’s HTML tags are case-sensitive, unlike those in standard HTML. Since Angular’s syntax is case-sensitive, it can’t use built-in HTML parsers in browsers. This implies that directives like ngFor and ngModel are not supported in browsers by default. By modifying the DOM, NgFor may reuse the same HTML template for each item in an array. As long as the Ng-model directive is present, the value of HTML controls may be bound to data from the application.
Aurelia’s template system makes it simple for programmers to enclose all templates in a single tag. This is difficult to do with Angular and may not even be feasible. Still, Angular calls for the developer to name the templates and components themselves, regardless of whether this is the case.
Binding
When comparing how the two frameworks approach tying events to actions, the differences in design philosophy become clear. While Angular makes it tough and may cause confusion when using one-way binding, Aurelia simplifies two-way binding. Information is only sent in one direction, from objects to the user interface, in a one-way binding scenario (UI). With two-way binding, changes to the objects or the user interface are immediately mirrored in the other.
Aurelia uses one-way binding by default. Common examples of two-way binding include binding an input widget to a certain view model. However, many programmers see two-way binding as an anti-pattern since it makes it hard to comprehend the code in big systems. The syntax used by Aurelia to bind class-level variables is similarly reminiscent of JS. Aurelia allows developers to record their work more efficiently by allowing them to declare the binding they’re using.
Popularity
According to a recent poll conducted by Hot frameworks, Angular is preferred above Aurelia in every metric. Stack Overflow users have given Angular a score of 95, while Github users have given it a score of 90, for a total score of 92. On the other hand, Aurelia has a 69 total score across GitHub, Stack Overflow, and other sites. The absence of widely used, successful online apps written in Aurelia up until recently is to blame for the language’s relative obscurity. Microsoft’s new employment site, built using Aurelia, has gone live.
Market Share Information for Aurelia Source:
- Statistics on the Slope of Market Penetration Using an Angular Measurement
- Statistics from GitHub and StackOverflow for Aurelia
- Summarized Data from Angular’s Activity on Github and Stack Overflow
Commercial Support
Because of Google’s support, Angular has access to a large user base and a thriving ecosystem. Since Angular is open-source, its enormous community implies that Google does not provide user-specific support.
Since Aurelia’s ecosystem is tiny, third-party components are few. Through its parent firm, Blue Spire Inc., which also offers consulting services to Aurelia customers, the company offers support for Aurelia applications. In addition, because of its simplicity, standard compliance, and ease of front and back-end development, Aurelia is quickly expanding its ecosystem experience.
Language Support
Typescript is the only JS language supported by Angular. Typescript is supported by Aurelia, although developers are free to use whatever language they wish, including ECMAScript (ES) and its many forks. While Aurelia supports ES, most of its resources and documentation are written in Typescript. Therefore developers are strongly urged to use it instead.
Since its publication in 1997, JS has been the most popular implementation of Ecma International’s ES specification for scripting languages. Other popular ES variations include ES5, ES 2015, ES 2016, and ES.Next. Tools like Gulpfiles are available in Aurelia to help translate ES versions.
Routing
Routing Developers need to declare the top-level routes once in Aurelia while setting up the individual child components with the specifics of the routes’ sub-levels. This method entirely encloses the parts, making the intricacy of the parts invisible. In Angular, a module’s routes must be defined in a single configuration file, including their destinations, routable components, and sub-routes. This methodology significantly complicates route design in Angular.
Documentation
Aurelia and Angular both feature extensive online documentation and tutorials that may help developers get up and running quickly. Most obviously, Angular’s documentation has a higher learning curve. The key reason for this distinction is that Angular is regularly updated, so developers must constantly learn and adapt to new features and requirements. Moreover, Angular is the more complicated framework, making the shift from using it as-is to altering how it functions more difficult.
Interoperability
Compared to Angular, Aurelia excels in interoperability and works well with other frameworks. In order to utilize React components, programmers, for instance, must first create a unique Aurelia component. Since both Aurelia and Polymer are founded on the WebComponents specifications, they are compatible with one another.
Constant Changes
Rapid development in both the Angular and Aurelia communities means that both products will soon undergo substantial overhauls.
Angular
The most noticeable changes in Angular 9 are the default use of the Ivy compiler and runtime and the introduction of the single-page application pattern. As a result of this modification, Angular bundles are smaller, which benefits the framework’s overall performance, makes debugging easier, facilitates modifications to the types supported by Angular, and allows for more stable builds. In addition to the general speed boost provided by the Ivy compiler, the newest version of Angular also benefits from the default activation of AOT compilation, which results in a shorter build time. How IVY will ultimately affect developer enthusiasm for Angular is an open question.
Angular’s latest release now supports both TypeScript 3.6 and 3.7. Better CSS binding and enhanced internationalization are two further enhancements. There are also hundreds of bug fixes in Angular v9.
Improving Ivy to reduce the bundle size and execution time is anticipated to be the most important change in the next versions of Angular.
Aurelia 2
Aurelia 2 was launched in March 2020. All the features already available on Aurelia have been kept and vastly enhanced in this new edition. The binding and templating syntax and underlying component model are both unchanged. The rights reserved, Aurelia 2 maintains the dependency injection (DI) pattern, the compositional approach, and the centrality of standards.
Recent Modifications
A lot of the new features in Aurelia 2 are enhancements to preexisting tools, which are crucial for a framework to be successful in the modern world. Since it adheres to modern module loading standards, Aurelia 2 will function better with bundlers and loaders. These sets and generators are based on “plain old” JS. Error messages, logging, and stack tracing will all be enhanced with Aurelia 2’s new debugging features.
