Introduction to Angular

AngularJS was built by Google. It is a JavaScript model-view-controller (MVC) framework that makes it very easy to quickly build applications that run well on any desktop or mobile platform, in a very short period. AngularJS was initially released as an open-source offering but today it has now become one of the best known and most widely used javascript client-side frameworks offered. AngularJS 1.3 and it’s later version was combined with jquery and Twitter Bootstrap to give developers everything they need to rapidly build HTML5, JavaScript application front ends that use REST web services for the backend processes. Hence, AngularJs is a great modern web application platform that provides developers with a comprehensive set of tools and capabilities to build large, robust applications. Angular aims to ease developing applications that work for nearly any platform—whether mobile, web, or desktop. The Angular team has focused on building much more than a robust application framework; they’ve also built an entire ecosystem. Angular provides developers with a comprehensive set of tools and capabilities to build large, robust applications.

What is Angular?

Angular, developed by Google, is an open-source software engineering platform used for building user interfaces (front-end). It was developed by google developers named Misko Hevery and Adam Abrons. This framework is currently known as AngularJS and it’s first official release dates back to 2010.

AngularJS: With its first release, it’s main benefit was that it would let developers turn HTML-based documents into dynamic content. Before AngularJs came into existence, HTML and web markup languages were usually static. This means users couldn’t actively interact with HTML pages’ interfaces as the ways to build dynamic SPAs were really complex at that time.

Angular 2+: Google released Angular2 in September 2016. In this release, the Angular framework was completely re-written by the same development team to match the modern requirements of the web. This gave developers a tough time as migrating to Angular2 required too many modifications due to different syntax.

Angular versions history: Angular 2-8:

The Angular community is basically split into two terminologies for angular: AngularJS and Angular. Angular framework includes versions from 2 to the most recent one – Angular 8. The latest was released in May 2019(version-8) while version 9 is planned for October 2019. Let’s have a brief walkthrough about all the versions of angular.

Angular 2

Angular2 came with numerous changes to the initial framework, as it was written in Typescript, it had a new compiler and had support for mobile also. The architecture style in this release was component-based and had features like application size reduction and some great syntax changes.

Angular 4

Angular saw major updates in the Angular router, which was already updated to the third version. Due to this reason, Angular3 was skipped and Angular4 was released as the router was also updated to the fourth version. In this release, Angular CLI 1.0.0 was introduced as a core element of the Angular project.

Angular 5-6

The release of the fifth and sixth versions was majorly about Optimizing Angular CLI and Angular compilers. Another change was improvements in workspaces with Angular CLI, to host multiple angular projects in different directories. Angular version 6 introduced Google’s Material Design SDK.

Angular 7

With Angular 7 again CLI saw improvements majorly with prompts. With the help of Prompts, CLI became more intuitive because it provided tips to explain the functions and purposes of elements. Applications received various improvements in the size of the code-base and overall performances. Besides, these some major CLI documentation updates also came.

Angular 8: the latest version of Angular

In the latest update, Angular 8, it was a synchronized released with Angular CLI 8 and Angular Material 8. Another improvement is differential loading. It is used to upload browser-specific bundles to support legacy browsers and upload content faster.

AngularJS Development Services

Features of Angular

  • Angular is self-Implementing thus MVC implementation becomes stress-free.
  • Flexibility to add and change properties directly
  • The Angular code is cleaner and natural due to its plain old JavaScript.
  • Facilitates 2-way data binding.
  • Angular is popular for its single-page applications as it doesn’t entertain page reloads.
  • AngularJS supports deep linking.
  • Due to less dependencies, there is a decrease in overheads.

How Angular is different from other front-end frameworks.

  • Relieves stress through MVC implementation.
  • Data-Model is development-friendly.
  • data-binding.
  • Single Page Applications.
  • Test-first Approach.

Benefits of Angular

  • Time and cost for development is reduced.
  • Easily Affordable.
  • Capability to change.
  • REST friendly.
  • Compatible with Browser.
  • Web and Mobile apps are swiftly developed.
  • Capable to reuse.
  • Mobile friendly.
  • Localization.
  • Ability to recognize smart change.

Things to consider while choosing Angular for creating your application.

Building web applications to meet the needs of every user is not an easy task. The quality and complexity of applications and users’ expectations, always keep on increasing the quality and capabilities of the application. Angular exists to help developers to deliver applications that meet such user demands. Some of the reasons to choose angular are as follows:

  • Angular is inspired by the latest web standards and has enhanced modern capabilities. Angular design its development process and the frameworks around the most common standards like using the latest JavaScript language features, and using modern capabilities like embracing TypeScript for type enforcement.
  • Availability of development tooling with customizations: Angular provides a common developer experience through its CLI tooling (for generating, building, testing, and deploying apps while making those same tools available for easy integration into custom solutions like custom build toolchain and third-party tools like different editors or IDEs.
  • Angular has a large community: There is an ever-growing number of third-party libraries, UI libraries, blog posts, and events.