Why You Should Migrate Away From AngularJS

Overview

With the legacy experience of the Angular Javascript framework, web developers have grown to lean on the framework as a go-to tool. Today, we wanted to go through a few of the reasons why you should look to migrate your existing AngularJS projects (any Angular release version under 2) to a more modern and actively supported framework (or library).

Even though AngularJS is a fantastic piece of technology that surely was top of its class when it came out (October 2010) and despite the fact that we’ve enjoyed working with its successor Angular.io (also known as Angular 2+), AngularJS has become outdated (EOL December 2021), and a risk to your company in a variety of different ways.

The framework has reached end of support (Version Support Status). This means that it has become read-only mode, therefore it will not be updated further. The framework has not been developed for over a year now (Release 1.8.2 happened in October 2020), and even though extended support was supposed to end mid-2021, it was extended to December 2021 due to the global pandemic. Here’s a blog post by the Angular team regarding discontinued long term support.

To add some support to the point, Angular was created and mainly maintained by Google. Google recognized the shortcomings of AngularJS, and completely rewrote it to release Angular.io. AngularJS only made it to version 1.8.3, however Angular.io has already made it to major version 13 (current at time of writing), with many more versions to come.

What Could Be Making You Hold On To Your Existing AngularJS Apps

Trust us, we’ve been there. You have a perfectly functioning application which needs little maintenance, and you have engineers who know it in and out already. Why invest a part of your budget in fixing something that’s not broken? Why bring in new people that don’t know the product? Why push your engineers to do something new/different to what they’ve been doing?

The Reasons

• Technology: As stated earlier, AngularJS is outdated. This means that in its feature-set, performance, and just keeping up with latest developments in Javascript and the web browsers, AngularJS has clearly lagged behind, mainly due to the fact that it has been in maintenance mode and not actively developed on for years. If you stay on this framework, you won’t take advantage of the rapidly evolving web world, and the evolving smart devices, and their new features.
• Support: As the framework is no longer maintained, any new issues or limitations you encounter will not only lack an answer/help from the AngularJS team (again, not supported anymore), you most probably also won’t have a huge community online to help you with it, like you would have with any modern framework. This could mean a longer time to fix issues that come up in your application, and a rough experience for your engineers and users.
• Security: Perhaps the biggest reason why you should move away from AngularJS. Like any unsupported package out there, you won’t be protected when any new security exploits are identified, be it within the framework itself, or any of its thousands of dependencies and indirect dependencies (yes, your app can be exploited by vulnerabilities in the dependencies of the dependencies of AngularJS which is your app’s dependency… you get the point). Usually when something like this happens in an actively supported package, a fix will be published quite swiftly in response to it, or any dependency that includes the vulnerability will be updated with a newer version.
• Talent: Not only do you want to provide the best possible experience for your users, but also for your app engineers. When you are trying to retain or expand your software team, AngularJS will weigh on any engineer’s decision. Engineers will want to work with quality, cutting edge technology. It is hard for engineers to get or even stay excited about working on a framework that has reached end of life. It will be much easier for you to retain and hire engineers if your apps run on modern technologies and following best practices and industry trends. I cannot stress how much easier it will be to fill open positions when your tech stack is attractive for the engineers. You can also think about what will happen once you actually find someone willing to do the job on your legacy system, they will play hard to get and you’ll end up paying more for an engineer that is probably not up to date on industry standards.
• Business: For current technologies, the help you will get from the online community is massive, which speeds up the time it takes to fix and implement new features, and to resolve critical situations that may arise. Not only your engineers will be happier and more engaged in what they are doing, it also impacts your branding. Are you a company that invests in and works with the latest and greatest? Or a company that settles with whatever is there?

Closing Thoughts

With confidence, we have seen the impact that migrating legacy applications has had for many of our customers, and it is massive. Not only do applications come alive and look and feel more modern, but engineers come to work in a better mood and eager to get things done, and a true engineering culture is fostered.