Why choose the Angular framework
Disclaimer
This article is not about JavaScript framework comparison or if Angular is the best JavaScript framework of all. This article will try to explain why you should consider choosing Angular for your web development needs and what are the benefits of doing so.
Why Angular
Answering the question “Why should someone choose Angular for web development” can be twofold:
- The Angular framework is best suited for developing enterprise scalable web applications.
- The Angular framework is preferred by millions of developers around the world. According to official statistics from the Angular team at Google, it is currently used by more than 1,500,000 developers worldwide.
All JavaScript frameworks do roughly the same job. It is only a matter of what makes someone feel more comfortable when it comes to choosing the framework that they are going to use.
To better understand why should someone choose the Angular framework for developing web applications, we need to understand the main pillars of the framework.
The three pillars of Angular
The main pillars of the Angular framework are depicted in the following image:
Let’s explain each one of them in detail.
Cross-platform
The term cross-platform in the Angular context refers to the following platforms: web, server, desktop, and mobile. Angular can run natively only on the web because it is a JavaScript framework. Angular cannot run on the remaining three by default. It is an amazing community that supports the Angular framework and enables it to do so. The community has built the following integration projects to run the Angular framework on each platform:
- Angular Universal: enables Angular applications to render on the server
- Angular Service Worker: enables Angular applications to run as PWA native desktop ones
- Ionic Framework: enables Angular applications to run on mobile devices
Easy onboarding
The available infrastructure of Angular makes onboarding new developers to the framework a breeze. When we create a new Angular application from scratch, we also get a rich collection of built-in first-party libraries along with the core framework:
In the previous image, we can see a subset of those libraries. They are installed along with the framework but they are not used unless we import them into our Angular project. Some of these libraries include:
- A built-in HTTP client for interacting with REST APIs
- A test runner for running unit tests and keeping applications reliable
- An animations package for giving motion to an Angular application
- and much much more…
Incredible tooling
The Angular ecosystem is greatly supported by an incredible collection of tooling for any use case. The Angular team has developed two of the most basic ones: the Angular CLI and the Angular DevTools.
The Angular CLI is a command-line interface for Angular that allows us to perform various tasks in an Angular application such as scaffolding, building, testing, and deployment. It is the most essential tool in the toolchain of an Angular developer. It delegates the hard task of setup and configuration of an Angular project and allows us to concentrate on doing what we love: coding!
The Angular DevTools is a Chrome extension that can be run on any Chromium-based browser, such as Google Chrome and Edge, and allows us to debug and profile Angular applications from the comfort of our browser.
Who uses Angular
If you navigate to madewithangular.com, you will see a huge list of websites that are currently running the Angular framework. Additionally, more than 2,500 projects inside Google use the Angular framework.
The usage of Angular inside Google enhances the reliability of the framework because every time a new version is released, it will first be tested in those 2,500+ projects and if there are no problems it will be released publicly in the open-source community. So, it is inevitable that any issues or bugs will be detected early on before production.
Conclusion
The Angular framework is a powerful cross-platform JavaScript framework that can satisfy any business need including the enterprise sector. To learn more about how you can get started with Angular, you can watch my talk on Angular rocks the Front End at the CDI Tech Hiring Days event of Pfizer in Thessaloniki. For an English version of the talk, you can watch the presentation I gave in GDG Athens at https://youtu.be/soS_xVFiHUY.
If you have any questions about the Angular framework please let me know in the comments below.
