Software developers' perceptions about angularjs

Abstract

The construction of modern Web applications demands the use of new technologies and development models to provide better user experiences. An example is the single-page model used for the development of Web UIs. This model uses asynchronous communication (AJAX) to avoid reloading the entire page with every user action that modifies the state of the application. Applications developed with this approach are known as Single-Page Applications (SPAs). Important challenges appear in the development of SPAs. Since a greater part of features of the applications are implemented in theclient side, larger and more complex JavaScript code bases are necessary. For example, developers have to make decisions about how to structure their code to be maintainable. To solve these problems, a new family of JavaScript frameworks has emerged to structure applications using the MVC pattern (or a variation of it). From these frameworks, the most popular is AngularJS. This fact can be evidenced by comparing the number of searches in Google, the number of contributors in GitHub, and the number of questions and answers in Stack Overflow. In spite of the popularity of AngularJS, there is not a clear knowledge about how its architectural properties and features affectthe development experience of Web applications. Since this knowledge can contribute to the evolution of tools and the adoption of better practices in the development of Web-based systems, in this master dissertation we report an empirical study about the development experience provided by AngularJS based on developers perceptions and experiences. We used two surveys as the main research instrument. The first surveywas used to investigate general aspects of AngularJS and the second one was used to investigate the performance of the framework. We received 460 and 95 responses, respectively. Our principal contributions include the identification of the most appreciated features of AngularJS, the most problematic aspects of the framework, common practices to deal with performance problems, and general and technical causes of these problems.