Vue From an Angular Programmer’s Perspective

Vue from an Angular programmer’s perspective

Before we start, this is not another blog post about which framework is “better." I have been working with Angular (version 2 and above) for two years, and now I’m starting a new project with Vue. In this post, I will share my experience about learning and using Vue compared to Angular.

Learning Vue

My first observation is that, by reading the official documentation in a couple of hours, one has the confidence to be able to start a medium-sized development. However, with Angular, I did not experience this until a long time after using the framework: I believe the main reason for this difference is because I had to learn many new concepts, such as decorators, observables, typescript, among others.

Angular and Vue are inspired by AngularJS, therefore, they have many similarities. Below you'll see some similarities from an example component written in both frameworks:

Conditional rendering, loop iterations, data and event binding look very similar in both frameworks:

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As you can see in the table and picture above, If you already know Angular, you will be familiar with almost everything when starting with Vue.

Working with Vue

Okay, we already read the official documentation, we feel confident and we think we are ready to work with Vue, but… what about a real project?

Well, I have been working on a large-scale project with Vue for the last month and these are my feelings:

1. In Vue, everything is where it should be. It is elegant, simple and intuitive.
2. I don’t need to check the official documents very often, the API surface is smaller than Angular’s and I can remember it for the most part.
3. When I do need to check the documents, I usually find what I am looking for quickly. Vue has one of the most beautiful and clear documentations I ever read.
4. When I try something fancy/tricky and I need help from the community, they respond (via StackOverflow, Gitter, and Discord).
5. So far, I have found that everything I can do in Angular can be done in Vue with much more ease.
6. I do not miss Angular.
7. I would use Vue for future projects if I had the choice.

Wrap-Up

From an Angular programmer’s perspective, I’m pretty sure that if you taste Vue, you will not want to go back. I am not telling you that Vue is the definitive framework, but definitely, you need to give it a try and see it in action in a real project.

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Feel free to contact me if you have questions/comments about this blog at info@experoinc.com.