Migrating from AngularJS to Vue  – Part 1

Tipalti
By Tipalti
Tipalti

Tipalti

Tipalti’s revolutionary approach to invoice-based AP automation and non-invoiced global partner payments is designed to free your finance and accounting team from doing complex, manual, unrewarding payables work.

Updated December 20, 2024

Here at Tipalti, we have multiple web applications which were written over the course of the past 10 years. The newest of which is an AngularJS application that was born at the beginning of 2014. Back then AngularJS was the most common Javascript framework, and it made sense to start a new application with it. The following is our journey of migrating and rewriting this app from AngularJS to a new VueJS 2 app.

Why Migrate?

Google declared in 2018 that AngularJS is going into support only mode and that will end in 2021. We wouldn’t want our application using a framework without any support. So the sooner we can start migrating the better, as migration can take quite some time.

Why Vue?

As of writing this, there are 3 major players in the front-end framework ecosystem: Angular, React and Vue.
It may appear that for most people migrating from angularJS to Angular is a better idea than a different framework. However, this migration is as complicated as any other migration option, thanks to Google’s total rewriting of the angular framework.

I won’t go into the whole process we underwent until finally deciding to go with Vue, but I’ll share the main reasons we chose to do so. You can find a lot of information on various blogs and tech sites that support these claims.

  • Great performance — Vue is supposed to have better performance than Angular and according to some comparisons better than React as well.
  • Growing community and GitHub commits — It is easy to see on Trends that the Vue community is growing with each passing month and it’s GitHub repo is one of the most active ones.
  • Simplicity — Vue is so easy to learn! Tutorials are short, clear and in a really short time, one can gain enough knowledge needed in order to start writing Vue applications.
  • Similarity to AngularJS — Though it is not a good reason on its own, the similarity to AngularJS makes learning Vue easier.

You can read more reasons in THIS fine post.

What was our status when we started?

It is important to mention that our application was and still is in development, so stopping everything and releasing a new version 6 months (hopefully) later was not an option. We had to take small steps that would allow us to gradually migrate to Vue without losing the ability to develop new features in our application going forward.

During the course of the application development, we followed best practices guides such as John Pappa’s and Todd Motto’s.

The final version of our application was such that:

  • All code was bundled with Webpack.
  • All constant files were AngularJS consts.
  • All model classes were AngularJS Factories.
  • All API calls were made from AngularJS Services.
  • Some of the UI was an HTML with controller related to it (especially for ui-route) and some were written as Components (with the introduction of Component to AngularJS in 1.5 version).
  • Client unit testing was written using Jasmine and Karma.

Can it be done incrementally?

Migrating a large scale application such as the one we have into Vue is a long process. We had to think carefully about the steps we would need to take in order to make it a successful one, that would allow us to write new code in Vue and migrate small portions of the app over time.

As you can understand from the above, our code was tightly coupled to AngularJS, such that in order to migrate to Vue some actions were needed to be made prior to the actual migration — and that was the first part of our migration plan.

It’s important to emphasize that as we started the migration, we understood that although the best practices guides mentioned above are really good, they had made us couple our code to a specific framework without a real need to actually do so.

This is also one of the lessons we learned during our migration — Write as much pure JS code as you possibly can and depend as little as possible on frameworks, as frameworks come and go, and you can easily find yourself trying to migrate again to a new framework in 2–3 years. It seems obvious as that’s what SOLID principles are all about, however it’s sometimes easy to miss those principles when ignoring the framework itself as a dependency.

What were our first steps in the migration plan?

So, the actual action items we created as the preliminary stage of our migration plan were detaching everything possible from AngularJS. Meaning modifying code that has little dependencies, but many others depend on it from AngularJS to ES6 style. By doing so we are detaching it from AngularJS ecosystem. Practically, we transformed shared code to be used by import/export instead of AngularJS built-in dependency injection.

To wrap things up, we created the following action items:

  • Remove all const injection to AngularJS and use export statements. Every new const will be added as an ES6 const and will be used by import-export.
  • Update our httpService (which was an AngularJS service) which is the HTTP request proxy in our app. Every API call in our application was made using this service. We replaced the $http dependency with axios and by doing so created an AngularJS-free httpService. Following that, we removed the injection of httpService from every component in our app and included it with an import system.
  • Create a new testing environment using Chai, Sinon, and Mocha, which allows us to test ES6 classes that are not part of the AngularJS app.
  • Transfer all BL services from AngularJS to pure ES6 classes and remove their dependency from our app.
  • Create a private NPM with shared vue controls what will be used by every application we have. This is not a necessity for the first step to full migration, but it will allow us to reuse components across multiple apps and have them the same behavior and styling (which can be overridden of course), which is something that is expected from different apps in the same organization.

What’s next?

As for our next steps, every new feature will be developed in Vue and will be for now part of the AngularJS app by using ng-vue directive, and at the same time, we can start migrating logical components and pages from AngularJS to Vue by leveraging that same great ng-vue directive.

We did migrate one page to ng-vue and added new tests for the vue components we created, in addition to embedding Vuex that will eventually take control of the state data.
Once we finished all the above, we were ready to take the next step of our migration….
More to follow on the next post.

Recommendations

You may also like