What are the advantages of using AngularJS over JQuery?
Here are my top 5 advantages:
It provides structure to JavaScript
Using jQuery “back in the day” resulted in wild west JavaScript development. Code all over the place…nothing was easy to read, just events and DOM manipulation everywhere. The advantage of these new JavaScript libraries like AngularJs, Aurelia, Ember, and Meteor is that it provides a more “civilized” and structured way of building complete JavaScript applications. 😉
Templating
jQuery does have some templating, but each JavaScript library has that built into it by nature.
Two-way data-binding
While you can write a simple two-way data-binding event in jQuery, JavaScript MVC libraries provide a more declarative (using HTML) way of connecting models to your view.
Great for SPA (Single-Page Applications)
At one point, I started writing a pure HTML, CSS, and JavaScript/jQuery application for strictly mobile (ASP.NET MVC Optimization Series: Introduction and Setup ). The moral of the story is that libraries like Angular, Aurelia, Ember, and Meteor provide all of the plumbing for you instead of writing all of it in jQuery (which I will be rewriting my optimized HTML app using Aurelia in a future post).
Modular development
Angular (and other JavaScript libraries) provide an easier way to load modular pieces of code and views dynamically into your application. Yes, I know there is a $(“div”).load() in jQuery, but this is code that shouldn’t be sprinkled throughout your jQuery application. It should be part of the library.
