Angular JS vs Modern MVC frameworks

Question

I might be wrong for some things here, but here is what I recently though about.

Modern frameworks MVC such as ASP.NET MVC 5, CakePHP, Java Spring etc. has their logic clearly separated into Models View and Controller. Specifically for handling the presentation layer in ASP.NET MVC we have Razor Views, in CakePHP we have the CTP views in Java Spring we have the JSPs...

And here it comes the Angular JS which breaks my vision about those MVC frameworks in general. Why would we ever need to have Angular JS and MVC architecture on the client side since we MVC robust technologies such as the ones that I listed above which could actually do the same job ?

I can think of only one use case. Let's we have REST API that we need to consume, then Angular JS would be a great idea to use. But then I am questioning myself is the WEB becoming just another platform that consumes an API, just like the iOS and Android which in most cases do nothing but consuming an API (not talking about notifications, location service and etc.). If so can we say that those MVC frameworks are dying ?

Answer 1

Yes, the web (JS/CSS/HTML) is a platform like iOS or Android or even desktop apps. There are many desktop apps too that are actually web apps in a chromium package. The Slack desktop app comes to mind as one such example if I remember correctly. Edit: more than just Slack is built this way. The underlying framework is called "Electron" and it's built by GitHub.

Answer 2

I think both have their perks.

Consider this: Use back end MVC frameworks to give an initial display of the webapp. Eg the page is serverd with the dynamic content.

Then use a front end MV* framework to give a "lively" impression of the webapp. Eg updating data in real time. Eg requesting data updates via ajax and display the updated data to the user

It can improve user experience