As I’ve spent more time working with Rails, I’ve realized that, even without Angular, a Rails site is capable of being fully-interactive, ajax-powered fun-times machine. I know what you’re thinking: “Duh! That’s true of everything from plain html to php!” Okay, yes, that’s true. But with Rails you can do it without really having to translate between server-side and javascript. Here’s what I mean:

Unobtrusive Javascript

Using jQuery for a ajax-heavy site is truly obtrusive to your experience to a developer. Every time you type event.preventDefault() you are saying, “Don’t do the thing that I wrote code for, do something else that requires more code!” Angular makes this better with its ng-clicks and ng-submits, but you still have to spend time formulating a json response, and then translating that response into html in your javascript.

With unobtrusive javascript, you can respond with a js.erb file that just inserts a partial you already wrote for the initial html response, so your total new code is adding format.js to your controller and $('selector').html('<%= j render partial: "a partial" %>'). Obviously it can be more complicated than that, but it usually isn’t.

Degrading Gracefully

Honestly, I don’t think degrading gracefully when javascript is not enabled is very important, but if I can do it while writing less code than Angular I see that as a win. It is comforting to know that if my grandma accidentally turned javascript off in her browser she can still use my site just fine.

My conclusion

So I removed Angular from this site. I know it doesn’t really matter to users, but for me it’s made life easier. Since there is less code to write, I’m more likely to add new features. For example, I’ve already updated the site to use markdown instead of html, which has made writing posts faster and more fun!

I still think Angular is great and will continue to use it for projects, but I think when it comes to Rails, I’ll keep using unobtrusive javascript until I have a real reason not to.