AngularJS

What is AngularJS?

Well, AngularJS is a popular JavaScript Frontend Framework for creating web application which was released by Google in the year 2010. It became quite popular because of its rich features and built-in functionality to create reactive and responsive web apps.

Problems with AngularJS

Then, around year 2012–14 frameworks like ember.js and react.js (developed by Facebook) popped in with a better benchmark results and performance, highlighting the AngularJS drawbacks to the developer community.

Inception of the new Angular (Version 2)

Now, the angular team decided to create a new framework instead of upgrading AngularJS by incorporating all their hard learned lessons from AngularJS. Hence, Angular 2 was released in Sept’ 2016 which is a complete re-write of AngularJS.

Confusion because of names and versions

Now, the team decided to go ahead with the same name except the ‘JS’ part. So, the new angular is called as just angular and follows a semantic version approach for versioning. According to it, a new major version of angular will be released in every six months (upgraded version, not a rewrite i.e. Angular version 2/4/5 are all same and should be referred as ‘angular’ only). The current version is 5.

Adoption and Worldwide Response

Since the new angular is a complete re-write, it demands you to re-write your old AngularJS application from scratch using the new Angular (in case you want to update your app as per the current angular). This is a huge challenge for the companies. Also, the new angular has a bit steep learning curve (PS, if follow proper structure, its not that hard as people say). Besides these, angular is quite good in terms of performance and provides you an end-to-end solution, from testing to hybrid-mobile-apps to animations. Also, the entire angular app development process is suitable for large teams and large projects.

Features of New Angular:

1. Backward Compatibility: So, application written using Angular 2 will be compatible with Angular 4 as well.

2. TypeScript: The version of TypeScript is upgraded from 1.8 to 2.1. This will improve the speed of ngc (angular compiler) and you will get better type checking throughout your application.

3. In-Built Compiler: Angular 4 comes with the inbuilt compiler to report the template errors right in the IDE. Google emphasizes improvements in tooling as well as reduced code generation.

4. Reduction of Code: They have made changes to AOT generated code such that you will find reduction in the size of the generated code for the components by around 60% in most of the cases.

5. Animation Package: They have segregated animation package from @angular/core as a separate and dedication package. Therefore, if you don’t use animations, this extra code will not end up in your production bundles.

6. Improved *ngIf and *ngFor: if/else style syntax has been introduced where you can assign local variables such as when unrolling an observable.

7. Flat ES Modules: Modules are shipped as flattened version that helps in tree-shaking and reduce the size of generated bundles. It also speeds up the building process, transpilation and loading in the browser in certain scenarios.