The rapid pace of web development often requires companies to decide between maintaining their current systems or modernizing to ensure future growth. This was the challenge faced by a leading company in the promotional products industry, as it encountered the limitations of its aging AngularJS-based platform.
This article examines how the company transformed its core application with a full rewrite, the key decisions behind that choice, and how working with House of Angular set the foundation for long-term success.
Background
A central component of the company’s offering is a robust platform designed to support the full supply and marketing lifecycle for tens of thousands of suppliers and distributors. The platform enables users to efficiently source products from a vast catalog, manage orders, and maintain seamless communication with suppliers. It also provides advanced inventory control features and real-time updates, streamlining workflows and reducing errors. Additionally, it supports marketing efforts with tools for creating customized materials and campaigns, helping users drive growth and engagement.
By bringing these capabilities together, the platform helps businesses streamline their operations, reduce costs, and remain competitive in a rapidly changing market. However, as technology advanced, the company realized its core application, built on AngularJS, was beginning to show its limitations, prompting the need for a more modern solution to meet growing user expectations.
Reasons for Modernization
Enhancing User Experience
The decision to modernize the application was driven primarily by the need to enhance the user experience. As the application became more complex, maintaining and updating it became challenging, resulting in slower performance and a less intuitive user interface. To remain competitive and continue delivering value to users, adopting modern technologies that provide greater flexibility, scalability, and improved performance was necessary. This challenge is common for many organizations with outdated frameworks, as discussed in our article: Outdated Frontend Frameworks: Risks & Solutions for Your Business.
Accumulated technical debt
The company needed a solution to address current limitations and set the foundation for future growth and innovation. The goal was to find a solution that would not only overcome current limitations but also lay the groundwork for future growth and innovation.
Related article: Why you should migrate from AngularJS to Angular
Why the Team Opted for an Application Rewrite Instead of Migration
As the organization considered modernizing the application, they had to decide whether to migrate the existing AngularJS framework to Angular, keeping much of the current structure, or opt for a complete rewrite to create a more scalable and future-proof solution from scratch.
🎞️ Download our free 5-min video guide, where our Angular Architect breaks down key migration pitfalls, based on real-world lessons.
Avoiding Legacy Issues
One of the main concerns when migrating the existing AngularJS application was the risk of carrying over legacy issues, such as outdated code practices, technical debt, and inconsistencies, which could have impeded the performance and scalability of the new system. A rewrite gave the business a chance to start over, making sure the new application was built on a strong foundation. This was a chance to implement modern coding standards and best practices from the beginning, laying the groundwork for a cleaner, more maintainable codebase.
Performance Optimization
The aging AngularJS framework, combined with technical debt, made optimization challenging. Migrating to a newer version of Angular while retaining parts of the old system risked introducing bottlenecks and increasing complexity. The full rewrite allowed for significant load times, UI responsiveness, and scalability improvements, ensuring the application could meet growing user demands without sacrificing speed or efficiency.
Scalability and Maintainability
The AngularJS codebase had become cumbersome, making adding new features or accommodating growth difficult. The rewrite simplified the application’s architecture, reducing complexity and making it more adaptable to future changes. This simplifies maintenance and enables scalability, fostering continuous innovation and expansion without being limited by the old system’s constraints.
Enhanced Developer Experience
The rewrite significantly improved the developer experience by establishing a more efficient and streamlined development environment. Implementing automated testing and consistent coding standards boosted productivity and simplified the onboarding process for new developers. In summary, the decision to rewrite was strategic, laying a stronger foundation for the company’s future.
For further insights check our related article:
Frontend Modernization: Migrate or Rewrite? Making the Best Choice
The Company’s Collaboration with House of Angular
When the team embarked on the complex task of rewriting its application, they recognized the importance of finding a partner who understood their needs.
“We knew that starting from scratch was the right decision, but it was crucial to have a partner who could ensure that we weren’t just building a new application – we were building it the right way from the ground up,”
— Chief Technology Officer
After careful consideration, the company selected House of Angular for the project. Our ability to understand their goals and deliver practical, scalable solutions was key to their decision.
“Discovering House of Angular was a breath of fresh air. They offered the support and expertise we needed to bring our vision to life,”
— Chief Technology Officer
Implementing Angular Development: Key Strategies in the company’s Rewrite
With the decision to rewrite the application set in motion, the client and House of Angular embarked on the project with a shared vision: to create a scalable, maintainable, and high-performing platform. The following sections outline the strategies and key initiatives that drove the success of this collaboration:
Establishing a Solid Foundation
From the outset, the focus was on creating a strong foundation for the new application. House of Angular and the client prioritized clean, modular code to ensure scalability and ease of maintenance. By following best practices in code organization, tooling, and static analysis, many of the issues plaguing the previous AngularJS implementation were successfully avoided.
As the company’s CTO noted, “We spent a lot of time on the organization of code, on tooling, and static analysis,” highlighting the importance of starting with a strong base.
Design System and Monorepo
In the early stages, the focus was on creating a UI component library, which later evolved into a full design system to ensure a consistent and cohesive user experience. This system became a key reference for all UI/UX decisions, ensuring each new component aligned with unified design principles.
At the same time, a monorepo structure was implemented to keep the codebase synchronized, enabling seamless updates across the application. This approach was essential in maintaining the integrity of the evolving application while also improving collaboration, simplifying dependency management, and enhancing build efficiency.
Performance Optimization and CI Process
Performance optimization was a central goal from the outset. By building the application from scratch, the teams effectively avoided potential bottlenecks and ensured the platform remained efficient and responsive. A robust continuous integration (CI) process was established, incorporating automated testing, type checking, and static analysis. This approach identifies issues early in the development cycle, reducing the risk of larger problems later on and aligning the CI process with developer tooling to improve overall efficiency.
Building Autonomous Teams
The restructuring of the company’s development teams was a significant aspect of the project’s success. House of Angular supported the client in creating focused, autonomous teams responsible for specific features within the application.
This structure improved efficiency and empowered the teams to make decisions and take responsibility for their areas, leading to a more streamlined and consistent development process. The monorepo setup further reinforced this approach, enabling separate teams to focus on different business areas or applications while maintaining an integrated and coherent codebase across the project.
If you want to get deeper into the topic of frontend migration, check our free video guide “5 Frontend Migration Risks You Need to Know”. Our expert will walk you through 5 key migration pitfalls, based on real-world lessons from Angular projects, so you can avoid costly mistakes.
The Impact of Angular Consulting: Achieving Long-Term Success with a Rebuilt Platform
The collaboration between the company and House of Angular has been more than just a response to immediate challenges; it has been a strategic effort to secure long-term success for the platform. Choosing to undertake a complete rewrite was a bold decision, but it has delivered significant rewards. The newly rebuilt application is now successfully deployed, and the business is steadily transitioning more clients from the old platform to this modern, robust solution.
House of Angular has contributed significantly to this transformation through several key initiatives that have enhanced the platform’s capabilities:
- Main Repository: A critical aspect of the platform’s redevelopment was establishing a centralized repository that now serves as the backbone of the company’s new platform. Our team provided essential support in constructing this repository, which has streamlined development processes, improved version control, and facilitated easier collaboration among developers. This has ensured a more stable and scalable environment that can accommodate the organization’s future growth.
- Connecting Suppliers, Distributors and Customers: Enhancing the platform’s capacity to act as a central hub for collaboration was another crucial focus. Our team played a key role in developing and integrating features that enable seamless connections between suppliers, distributors, and customers. This integration has significantly improved the user experience by creating a unified platform for all stakeholders to interact and collaborate efficiently, thus optimizing workflow and reducing the time required to complete various processes.
- Custom Website Creation Tool: Our developers developed a tool within the main application that allows the company’s clients to create complete websites using ready-made elements and publish them. This tool allows end-users to modify products and place orders directly on the website, facilitating the sale of products. This solution enhanced the company’s platform by providing a flexible, user-friendly way for clients to showcase and sell their products efficiently.
With the right support and partnership, you can confidently navigate your technical journey and achieve long-term success.
For organizations facing similar challenges, the client’s experience highlights the transformative power of the right partnership. Whether you are considering migration, a full rewrite, or a modernization, having specialized expertise by your side can transform complex transitions into a launchpad for future growth. With the right support and partnership, you can confidently navigate your technical journey and achieve long-term success.
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