What’s the angle between AngularJS and Angular? 180°
This is one of a three part series intended to inspire developers around the world to explore Angular’s newest release.
If you’re a web developer, keeping up with changes is part of life. Continuous improvements make the field attractive to me and I bet most developers would agree. Leave it to Google to test this hypothesis and our patience for change, once and for all!
Brief history
Eight years ago Google released Angular 1.x (now called AngularJS), a popular and widely supported front-end JavaScript framework for building state-of-the art, cross-browser compatible web applications. The web and devices have become more sophisticated since 2009, and competition among JavaScript frameworks has increased. AngularJS needed an update with significant improvements, leading to the birth of Angular 2 (now called Angular) in 2016 — a completely incompatible rewrite of AngularJS!
- If you’re an AngularJS developer, you may be questioning your life right now, or at least whether it’s worth transitioning over to Angular.
- If you’re a developer without any experience with the framework, you may be wondering whether it’s worth learning, over other new “so hot right now” alternatives like the React.js library.
But it’s not as bad as it sounds!
Since Angular is a Javascript framework, not just a library, it provides the scaffolding to build applications with more structure. Google has been working on the new version for a few years, rewriting and re-architecting it from the ground up to address the needs of modern developers: competitive speed, cross-platform development (web, native mobile, desktop) and responsiveness for long-term improvements. The result is cleaner and more maintainable applications.
A few of the largest changes include:
- You can bootstrap your app faster with the Command Line Interface (CLI): The CLI helps automate the development workflow to improve productivity. With short commands you can create boilerplate code and add features. You can also quickly serve, test and deploy your application.
- Your app is made of Components: AngularJS uses $scope to bind logic from a controller to a portion of the view. In Angular, $scope has been deprecated in exchange for components. Components are the basic building blocks of your application, each with an associated html template, stylesheet, and component class with logic. Your application is one big component, with a tree of dependent components built off of the root.
- Written in Typescript: TypeScript is a superset of Javascript. It allows you to define types and classes, but compiles down to JavaScript. It also has tooling, which works well with certain TypeScript aware editors like Atom, Visual Studio Code and Sublime.
- Angular for NativeScript: AngularJS required the use of Cordova, Ionic or Phonegap to develop mobile applications. The infrastructural changes to Angular have made it more compatible to mobile development. NativeScript seamlessly integrates with Angular, which allows you to build native web, iOS and Android mobile apps from one codebase.
- Speed: The optimized architecture is leaner. It also changes the way applications are rendered and compiled, significantly improving application speed and performance.
If you can’t wait for more details, the angular.io documentation has a great reference that maps AngularJS concepts and techniques to Angular.
How you can get started
At Upstate Interactive, we’re investing in Angular because we believe that it’s the future. But Angular is new, so finding resources and local developers is limited. We encourage anyone interested in learning to reach out to us. We’re excited to share our own experience transitioning through our blog, and by hosting meetups. Our last meetup was a presentation held on April 6, by Peter B. Smith. If you missed it, check out the slides here.
My next two posts will guide you through bootstrapping your own app with the latest version of Angular. Subscribe to our mailing list to get notified when they go live.
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