Knockout versus AngularJS

Index of Journals

It's a scene from 2015.

Srinivasan T and Aniket Sawant were working on a project that had a very modern UI and UX with respect to any other application built using iMAS platform. Srinivasan could not have pulled it off alone and Aniket who was an expert in iMAS and had working knowledge of AngularJS worked together on this project. It was a high visibility project and both Aniket and Srini received the quarterly award for it.

Subscriber Location Tracker: it was the first project that was built using Angular JS.
It had some fancy UI components like the World Heat Map and/or World Bubble Chart. It also had a 'Page Loading' spinner for a file upload or download utility.

This was a two line story of how AngularJS came in the GUI team. Apart from AngularJS, there were some applications being built by Vibrant Info team (Nitin Kacharia) that had a modern UI/UX that differed from the then-traditional iMAS applications.

The JS library that Nitin was using was KnockoutJS.
And the application that Nitin and team were working majorly on was iCampaign.

The problem was that the existing iMAS applications were using the vanilla JavaScript that too under the SCRIPT tag, instead of separate JS file. Some applications being touched or modified by the current team were getting jQuery used in them but alongside the vanilla code.

So the high priority work that the team was doing at that time was the revamping of the UI of a major application there at Mobileum. It's name was abbreviated as NTR, and it was the highest selling, most profitable product of Mobileum.

Now what the Chief Enterprise Architect (Brat) was doing around this time is also important and related to this talk.

Subhabrata Biswas, or Brat (with which he signed his mails and what people used to call him) was working on two projects related to the iMAS. Both were going to be major changes in the internals of the iMAS framework.
The two projects were related to each other, yet they deserve separate mention and space.
The first one was changing the iMAS internals to move it from Java, FreeMarker, XML and JavaScript stack to Java, Rhino Script and KnockoutJS stack based framework.

The second one was the Ad-hoc reporting extension of the iMAS.

As the company and it's clients had accumulated historic data, Mobileum had started adopting distributed databases for storing the Big Data, alongside the relational databases.
Ad-hoc reporting tool was built to give clients the report on their historic data or the Big Data. The Ad-hoc reporting tool used JSON based configuration files to understand, interpret and draw the chart like "Top 10 XYZ", Bottom 10 XYZ, produce aggregation reports like on weekly, monthly and / or yearly basis. It had plenty of visualisations like histogram, bubble chart, world map, line chart, table view, pie chart, stacked bar chart, scatter plot, etc. among many others using the JavaScript library of D3.JS. The reporting tool worked based on the descriptions provided by the user in the form of JSON file. These descriptions included table names, columns, type of chart required, and additional chart properties.

Personally speaking, I was hurt when I learnt that Brat and some project managers had got third party client VibrantInfo's developers to travel to Mumbai for training around these two new changes in the iMAS. 

To be frankly speaking, it effectively meant that the existing internal team had lost the opportunity to learn and re-skill.
And then this 'non re-skilling' was a major reason why Yaju and I were laid off in 2018.
In the meanwhile, Aniket has left the company on the 31st Dec 2015. He was offered promotion and better projects but nothing speaks louder than money, which was his prime ask.
Srini left the company in Nov 2017.
The conclusion is this:
Boss is always right.
If Brat thought he would use Knockout at the front-end then that was that.
I could never reason this 'Knockout vs AngularJS' with him but as of Jan, 2022, AngularJS has reached End-of-life while Knockout JS is still developing. Seems like Brat was right all along.

So as of this fight, Knockout came out as winner. 
Thank you for reading.

Tags: Journal,Investment,Management,Behavioral Science,