Going from Angular to Aurelia

I’ve started experimenting with Aurelia, the newest JavaScript MV* kid in town. Aurelia is created by Rob Eisenberg, who has 10 years experience building frameworks. He worked on the Angular for a while, but ended up being known as the guy who quit Google

I had the privilege of speaking with Rob at NDC 2015 before his talk on Aurelia, and I got a good impression of Aurelia. Rob also spoke well of his former work place at the Angular team, which speaks of character.

At work we started experimenting with Angular for rebuilding our dinosaur PowerBuilder software for the modern web as a SPA and we recently finished a prototype that uses Angular 1.4 and ASP.Net MVC. We made some conclusions:

  • Angular has a beautiful logo
  • Angular 1.4 is not (!==) Angular 2.0. The latter is a complete rewrite
  • Angular has a steep learning curve
  • Angular has quite vast and broad support in the community

Aurelia

So you want to learn Aurelia too? Aurelia wants to stay as close to the standards as possible. It’s written with JavaScript, so it lets you wirite ECMAScript 6 and 7 (using a transpiler lilke BabelJs) and it tries to stay out of the way so your code is not saturated with the framework’s opinions so much.

Start with the following two videos, which I find to be companions as one speaks of ECHMAScript 6 and 7 and the other is an introduction to Aurelia.

Rob speaking about ES6 at NDC 2015

Rob speaking about Aurelia at NDC 2015

Getting started

Then head on to the getting started section of aurelia.io and go through the tutorial. Also watch the introduction video at the front page of aurelia.io.

Update

Also have a look at this Aurelia blog post that compares Angular 2.0 code to Aurelia code: http://blog.durandal.io/2015/03/16/aurelia-and-angular-2-code-side-by-side/