Hard not to agree with this observation by Alex Howard about the newly branded U.S. Digital Services.

Given the anger, doubt and frustration prevalent in the public discourse around government IT, the only way public trust in the federal government's ability to use technology well for something other than surveillance and warfare will be through the deployment of beautiful, modern Web services that work. Jen Pahlka has explicitly connected government's technical competency to trust in this young century.

"If government is to regain the trust and faith of the public, we have to make services that work for users the norm, not the exception," she told to Government Technology, after leaving the White House. Mayors, governors and presidents are experiencing the truth of her statement around the country, from small towns to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The challenge here is to move beyond secure, mission-critical systems that work in insulated environments - but fail to provide high value - to focus on measurable outcomes, quick(er) wins, higher value services for citizens. This is the holy grail of digitization.

AngularJS and Durandal

When I read on the Angular blog that Rob Eisenberg is working with Angular in addition to continuing revisions on the Durandal templating library, I was understandably excited. I have really enjoyed working with Angular, not just as an SPA framework, but as a prescriptive, modular, and mature JavaScript framework, but like many people, I have found custom directives frustrating; jsFiddle and similar tools provide a good way to develop and test a new directive in isolation, but still. I've experienced this on other projects, using Adobe Flex, for instance. On a project team, you have a number of developers, one of whom supports custom web components, and that works okay, but the other developers don't really understand how the components work under the hood.

I am hoping that the next evolution of AngularJS (3.0) will align much more closely with Durandal, Web Components API, and Polymer. There is really no reason why custom Web Components cannot become just a standard practice for the web. And that's nothing like Angular custom directives, which are confusing, I think, because whereas in most cases Angular balances flexibility and prescription nicely, custom directives are incredibly flexible - transclude? allow directive through attribution or class, or just elements? and so forth. Custom directives are just way too flexible, and they need to be a simple API for doing one thing well, not a combinatorics problem.

On the other hand, what Angular provides that Durandal does not is exactly that balance of prescription and flexibility. Angular tells you how to do things like module structure and model-view-star, and as a development project lead, I appreciate that, because this makes establishing best practices and code reviews manageable. That is why I am expecting great things from Angular, especially if the next version also results in an update to the angular-ui.bootstrap project, providing a ready to use library of web components.