Mobilism 2015 will take place on 27th of March in Amsterdam. Today, our full line-up was revealed. Mobilism first-timers Petro Salema and Agnieszka Walorska are joined by veterans Seb Lee-Delisle, Stephanie Rieger (and me) to create a nice mix of the new and the familiar.

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The difference between back-enders and front-enders is that the first work in only one environment, while the second have to work with myriad of environments that may hold unpleasant surprises.

I feel that the subconscious assumption that a complex JavaScript-driven web site or web app will run in only one monolithic environment is the root cause of many problems front-enders see in back-end-driven web-based projects.

Even worse, where back-enders hold that they’re better in creating complex applications than front-enders — and they may even be right — some show an unwillingness to learn about the front end.

The combination of an insistence on being right about application structuring with a casual dismissal of front-end techniques aimed at catering to myriads of challenging environments makes the archetypical back-ender come across as arrogant. If you want to teach, be prepared to learn.

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Well, that was quite a ride. 50K hits on my Angular article (which is a LOT for me), and still people trickling in.

Predictably, trolls came out in the comment threads on Hacker News and Reddit, but also some thoughtful reactions, and even a few who defended my article. It almost seems as if the comment quality is going slightly up. That’s unexpected, and nice. (For the record, I’m not a fan of comments.)

There’s way too much feedback to treat it all — I encourage you to read the comments for yourself — but there’s one particular argument I’d like to point out. It’s about my belief that templating belongs on the server, and it was made in both comment threads:

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In the last six months or so I talked to several prospective clients that had a problem finding front-end consultants in order to help their dev teams get a grip on their Angular projects.

Although there are front-enders that are enthusiastic about Angular, I have the feeling that their number is surprisingly low for a major framework. I expected Angular to gain more traction than it has.

Angular is aimed at corporate IT departments rather than front-enders, many of whom are turned off by its peculiar coding style, its emulation of an HTML templating system that belongs on the server instead of in the browser, and its serious and fundamental performance issues.

I’d say Angular is mostly being used by people from a Java background because its coding style is aimed at them. Unfortunately they aren’t trained to recognise Angular’s performance problems.

I have doubts about Angular 1.x’s suitability for modern web development. If one is uncharitably inclined, one could describe it as a front-end framework by non-front-enders for non-front-enders.

The proposed radical Angular 2.0 rewrite aims to make it more palatable to front-enders, but I doubt they’re interested in yet another MVC framework. In addition, the rewrite will likely alienate Angular’s current target audience.

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