I’m looking at JsonForms as an alternative to formly, and I’m trying to decide if I want to switch for my project. I’m using Angular 17 and Material, so I can use it out of the box, and I do like some of the features of JsonForms, especially the array features.
But looking at the Renderer Sets page it looks like angular is a bit of an ugly stepchild for JsonForms… There are quite a few missing components (I’m especially missing all the oneOf variants). Looking at the forums it seems that there are people using it with Angular, but I get the feeling that the core team is mostly using React, and new developments seem to be more on the Vue side.
Are there plans to add more support to the Angular side? Is anybody in the core team actively working on that? More importantly, is the support for Angular declining, are there any plans to drop Angular at some point?
I may be able to put some work into adding components, if it makes sense, but if the long-term outlook is going away from Angular this may not be the right move for us.
The Angular renderers are in “maintenance mode” for us, i.e. we make sure that they work and try to keep them updated to the current Angular version but we don’t actively implement additional features.
Recently one Angular update had a lot of breaking changes (Angular 14 → 15) which we did not manage to complete within our support budget for a longer time. It took a great community contribution to update them to the latest Angular.
As long the effort of maintaining the Angular renderers does not grow larger as our budget, we will keep maintaining them. So for the foreseeable future we don’t intend or plan to deprecate them. Having more than two bindings is always good to keep the base code base honest and we will keep maintaining all three current bindings as long as the effort is reasonable.
Feature development for Angular does happen through the community, and as long as our guidelines are followed, we are happy to merge them. You might also be interested in our professional support.
I hope this is satisfactory for you. Let me know if you have further questions.
Hi Stefan,
Thanks for the update!
Having run Open Source projects myself (in the dark ages, i.e. before github), I am a little leery of depending on a system component that is not the main interest of the core development team. Communities are great, but I wouldn’t bet my farm on them.
There are quite a few missing components (I’m especially missing all the oneOf variants). Looking at the forums it seems that there are people using it with Angular, but I get the feeling that the core team is mostly using React, and new developments seem to be more on the Vue side.