Marrying Salesforce and Angular 2

Tl;dr

I have created an Angular 2 boilerplate here that allows you to more easily develop Angular 2 applications on the Salesforce platform. Doing so was not easy and it is by no means complete, so I welcome all contributions.

JavaScript and Salesforce

Imagine, if you will, that this article is instead a presentation at ng-conf, Dreamforce, Texas JS, or some other tech conference. If it were I would probably start by asking how many people have worked on the Salesforce platform and then, out of that number, how many people have attempted to write javascript applications that work on Salesforce. I would imagine that somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the people would be raising their hands right now (the remaining 60–70 percent I’m imagining are non-devs).

Being a JavaScript developer turned Salesforce developer I have gotten use to the tooling and flexibility that working in JavaScript provides. You have access to NPM and Bower, JavaScript transpilers, CSS pre-processors, linters, local servers, and a host of other tools that make you fast and productive. With Salesforce you get none of that.