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AngularJS vs ExpressJS: What are the differences?

Introduction

AngularJS and ExpressJS are two popular frameworks used for web development. While AngularJS is a front-end framework, ExpressJS is a back-end framework. Both frameworks have their own set of features and functionalities that make them suitable for different purposes. In this article, we will discuss the key differences between AngularJS and ExpressJS.

  1. Architecture: AngularJS follows the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture, which separates the application logic into three components - model, view, and controller. On the other hand, ExpressJS follows the Middleware architecture, which allows developers to define a chain of functions that execute sequentially for each request.

  2. Purpose: AngularJS is primarily used for building dynamic single-page applications (SPAs) by providing reusable components, data binding, and dependency injection. ExpressJS, on the other hand, is used for building server-side applications, especially in creating RESTful APIs and handling HTTP requests.

  3. Language: AngularJS is written in JavaScript and follows a front-end development approach. ExpressJS is written in Node.js and follows a server-side development approach.

  4. Routing: AngularJS provides its own client-side routing mechanism, which enables navigation between different views in a SPA without making a round trip to the server. ExpressJS, on the other hand, provides server-side routing where routes are defined on the server and the server handles the request and response.

  5. Views: AngularJS uses HTML as the templating language for defining views. It extends HTML with additional attributes and directives to make it more powerful for dynamic data binding and manipulation. ExpressJS, on the other hand, does not provide any specific views and allows developers to use any templating engine of their choice, such as EJS or Handlebars.

  6. Database Interaction: AngularJS does not have built-in capabilities for server-side database interaction and relies on using RESTful APIs to communicate with the server. ExpressJS, being a back-end framework, provides various modules and libraries for connecting to databases and performing database operations.

In summary, AngularJS is a front-end framework used for building dynamic SPAs, while ExpressJS is a back-end framework used for building server-side applications. AngularJS follows the MVC architecture and provides client-side routing, whereas ExpressJS follows the Middleware architecture and provides server-side routing. AngularJS uses HTML for views and relies on RESTful APIs for database interaction, while ExpressJS allows developers to choose any templating engine for views and provides built-in capabilities for database interaction.

Advice on AngularJS and ExpressJS
Needs advice
on
AngularJSAngularJSReactReact
and
Vue.jsVue.js

What is the best MVC stack to build mobile-friendly, light-weight, and fast single-page application with Spring Boot as back-end (Java)? Is Bootstrap still required to front-end layer these days?

The idea is to host on-premise initially with the potential to move to the cloud. Which combo would have minimal developer ramp-up time and low long-term maintenance costs (BAU support)?

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Replies (3)
Carolyne Stopa
Full Stack Developer at Contabilizei · | 10 upvotes · 559.5K views
Recommends
on
Vue.jsVue.js

React might be a good option if you're considering a mobile app for the future, because of react native. Although, Vue.js has the easiest learning curve and offers a better developer ramp-up time. Vue.js is great to build SPAs, very clean and organized and you won't have a lot of long-term maintenance problems (like AngularJS, for example). Bootstrap can still be used, but with flexbox there's no need anymore.

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Chaitanya Chunduri
Recommends
on
ReactReact

I recommend React because of less memory occupant compare to Angular, but this will depend on your organisation flexibility. When you use React you need to import different libraries as per your need. On the other side angular is a complete framework.

Performance-wise I vote for react js as it loads up quickly and lighter on the mobile. You can make good PWA with SSR as well.

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Recommends
on
ReactReact

If you are new to all three react will be a good choice considering, react-native will be useful if you want to build cross platform mobile application today or tomorrow. If you are talking about bootstrap styling framework than it's a choice you can style ur components by ur self or use bootstrap 4.0 framework. The complete stack mentioned above is platform agnostic u can run it anywhere you want be it cloud or on-premise.

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Decisions about AngularJS and ExpressJS
Kamaleshwar BN
Senior Software Engineer at Pulley · | 10 upvotes · 613.2K views

It was easier to find people who've worked on React than Vue. Angular did not have this problem, but seemed way too bloated compared to React. Angular also brings in restrictions working within their MVC framework. React on the other hand only handles the view/rendering part and rest of the control is left to the developers. React has a very active community, support and has lots of ready-to-use plugins/libraries available.

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José Oberto
Head of Engineering & Development at Chiper · | 14 upvotes · 532.7K views

It is a very versatile library that provides great development speed. Although, with a bad organization, maintaining projects can be a disaster. With a good architecture, this does not happen.

Angular is obviously powerful and robust. I do not rule it out for any future application, in fact with the arrival of micro frontends and cross-functional teams I think it could be useful. However, if I have to build a stack from scratch again, I'm left with react.

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John Clifford de Vera
Software Engineer at CircleYY · | 21 upvotes · 401.5K views

I used React not just because it is more popular than Angular. But the declarative and composition it gives out of the box is fascinating and React.js is just a very small UI library and you can build anything on top of it.

Composing components is the strongest asset of React for me as it can breakdown your application into smaller pieces which makes it easy to reuse and scale.

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Dennis Ziolkowski
Migrated
from
AngularJSAngularJS
to
AngularAngular

I was first sceptical about using Angular over AngularJS. That's because AngularJS was so easy to integrate in existing websites. But building apps from scratch with Angular is so much easier. Of course, you have to build and boilerplate them first, but after that - you save a ton of time. Also it's very cozy to write code in TypeScript.

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Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 23 upvotes · 4.7M views

Our whole Vue.js frontend stack (incl. SSR) consists of the following tools:

  • Nuxt.js consisting of Vue CLI, Vue Router, vuex, Webpack and Sass (Bundler for HTML5, CSS 3), Babel (Transpiler for JavaScript),
  • Vue Styleguidist as our style guide and pool of developed Vue.js components
  • Vuetify as Material Component Framework (for fast app development)
  • TypeScript as programming language
  • Apollo / GraphQL (incl. GraphiQL) for data access layer (https://apollo.vuejs.org/)
  • ESLint, TSLint and Prettier for coding style and code analyzes
  • Jest as testing framework
  • Google Fonts and Font Awesome for typography and icon toolkit
  • NativeScript-Vue for mobile development

The main reason we have chosen Vue.js over React and AngularJS is related to the following artifacts:

  • Empowered HTML. Vue.js has many similar approaches with Angular. This helps to optimize HTML blocks handling with the use of different components.
  • Detailed documentation. Vue.js has very good documentation which can fasten learning curve for developers.
  • Adaptability. It provides a rapid switching period from other frameworks. It has similarities with Angular and React in terms of design and architecture.
  • Awesome integration. Vue.js can be used for both building single-page applications and more difficult web interfaces of apps. Smaller interactive parts can be easily integrated into the existing infrastructure with no negative effect on the entire system.
  • Large scaling. Vue.js can help to develop pretty large reusable templates.
  • Tiny size. Vue.js weights around 20KB keeping its speed and flexibility. It allows reaching much better performance in comparison to other frameworks.
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Julius alvarado

It is a complete waste of time and life to learn a different framework to solve the same problem (Both AngularJS and Angular build A+ UI's, but both require a lot of time to learn). It's dumb to spend 200 hours learning AngularJS, then 200 hours learning Angular when you could spend 200 hours learning AngularJS and 200 hours learning how to solve a different problem (like AI/ML, Data Science, AR/VR, Digital Marketing, etc.)

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Jonas Stendahl

React has by far and away been our most important library choice throughout the history of Sellpy. It is a library that offers great flexibility supported by a really strong core. The React team is doing incredible work bringing quality features to the core project and tons of quality third party libraries fill in the gaps.

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Manuel Schoebel

When first used Angular, the documentation was horrible and also the construct of Angular super academic and hard to learn (back in 2014). When evaluating React it was way easier getting stated even though its html in js (jsx) approach was very different. After some time we really started to like the co-location and component based model. If you architect well, you will have a component completely in one file including js/html/css.

We solely focus on one technology for frontend development. The reason for that is, that offering customers excellent services we need to be up to date on all developments of the framework but also its community and vast amount of packages. Reading blogs, newsletters, podcasts and so on. You will realistically only be able to be really good at one, so thats for us: React!

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Pros of AngularJS
Pros of ExpressJS
  • 889
    Quick to develop
  • 589
    Great mvc
  • 573
    Powerful
  • 520
    Restful
  • 505
    Backed by google
  • 349
    Two-way data binding
  • 343
    Javascript
  • 329
    Open source
  • 307
    Dependency injection
  • 197
    Readable
  • 75
    Fast
  • 65
    Directives
  • 63
    Great community
  • 57
    Free
  • 38
    Extend html vocabulary
  • 29
    Components
  • 26
    Easy to test
  • 25
    Easy to learn
  • 24
    Easy to templates
  • 23
    Great documentation
  • 21
    Easy to start
  • 19
    Awesome
  • 18
    Light weight
  • 15
    Angular 2.0
  • 14
    Efficient
  • 14
    Javascript mvw framework
  • 14
    Great extensions
  • 11
    Easy to prototype with
  • 9
    High performance
  • 9
    Coffeescript
  • 8
    Two-way binding
  • 8
    Lots of community modules
  • 8
    Mvc
  • 7
    Easy to e2e
  • 7
    Clean and keeps code readable
  • 6
    One of the best frameworks
  • 6
    Easy for small applications
  • 5
    Works great with jquery
  • 5
    Fast development
  • 4
    I do not touch DOM
  • 4
    The two-way Data Binding is awesome
  • 3
    Hierarchical Data Structure
  • 3
    Be a developer, not a plumber.
  • 3
    Declarative programming
  • 3
    Typescript
  • 3
    Dart
  • 3
    Community
  • 2
    Fkin awesome
  • 2
    Opinionated in the right areas
  • 2
    Supports api , easy development
  • 2
    Common Place
  • 2
    Very very useful and fast framework for development
  • 2
    Linear learning curve
  • 2
    Great
  • 2
    Amazing community support
  • 2
    Readable code
  • 2
    Programming fun again
  • 2
    The powerful of binding, routing and controlling routes
  • 2
    Scopes
  • 2
    Consistency with backend architecture if using Nest
  • 1
    Fk react, all my homies hate react
  • 380
    Simple
  • 336
    Node.js
  • 244
    Javascript
  • 193
    High performance
  • 152
    Robust routing
  • 73
    Middlewares
  • 71
    Open source
  • 59
    Great community
  • 37
    Hybrid web applications
  • 16
    Well documented
  • 9
    Sinatra inspired
  • 9
    Rapid development
  • 7
    Socket connection
  • 7
    Isomorphic js.. superfast and easy
  • 5
    Light weight
  • 4
    Resource available for learning
  • 4
    Npm
  • 3
    Event loop
  • 3
    Callbacks
  • 2
    Data stream

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Cons of AngularJS
Cons of ExpressJS
  • 12
    Complex
  • 3
    Event Listener Overload
  • 3
    Dependency injection
  • 2
    Hard to learn
  • 2
    Learning Curve
  • 27
    Not python
  • 17
    Overrated
  • 14
    No multithreading
  • 9
    Javascript
  • 5
    Not fast
  • 2
    Easily Insecure for Novices

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What is AngularJS?

AngularJS lets you write client-side web applications as if you had a smarter browser. It lets you use good old HTML (or HAML, Jade and friends!) as your template language and lets you extend HTML’s syntax to express your application’s components clearly and succinctly. It automatically synchronizes data from your UI (view) with your JavaScript objects (model) through 2-way data binding.

What is ExpressJS?

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.

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What are some alternatives to AngularJS and ExpressJS?
JavaScript
JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.
Angular
It is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework. It is a development platform for building mobile and desktop web applications.
React
Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.
Node.js
Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.
jQuery
jQuery is a cross-platform JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting of HTML.
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