There are many JavaScript frameworks available for building an Web Application. A front-end framework is a technology providing us the right set of tools to build a web application while also defining how it should be designed and how the code should be organized.
During the initial days of web application development, it was purely running on JS Code(jQuery etc.) but you can see the evolution of web application makes the Client side UI more complex and therefore we are going for available front-end frameworks.
The most important three keywords which come’s to my mind whenever you learn a new technology.
- What is that?
- Why should I learn that?
- How to use that in my project?
What is Angular?
Angular is a TypeScript based front-end open-source web application framework led by the Angular Team at Google and also by a community of individuals and corporations. Angular is complete rewrite of Angular JS.
Angular 2.0 was announced at the ng-Europe conference 22-23 October 2014. Angular 2.0 moved to Beta on December 2015 and the first Release Candidate was published on May 2016. The final versions was released on September 14, 2016.
The new features includes semantic versioning, a CLI(Command Line Interface) and an entirely Component based Architecture. The major disadvantage of Angular 2 is, it was not backwards compatible with Angular JS. So if the developers want to use Angular from Angular JS they have rewrite all the codes.
And then after few months, Angular 4 was released on March 2017 which includes,
- Faster Compilation
- Reduction of Code Size
- Better bug fix alerts and
- Backwards compatible with Angular 2
A few months later, the next version of Angular was released called Angular 5 which includes,
- Build optimizer
- Improved Compiler
- Dependency Management
And there were lot of improvements done with Angular 6 and 7. And now the current version of Angular is Angular 8.
Expecting Angular 9 by end of December 2019.
Why should I use/learn Angular?
So whenever you learn a new technology, don’t learn it because you have to. Go and research about why should i use this instead of others. So in this section we will see why should i use/learn Angular rather than other frameworks.
Angular is Easier
The new Angular code base is more modern, more capable and easier for new programmers to learn. With Angular JS, developers want to have an knowledge on Controllers, Services, Factories, Providers and other concepts that could be confusing, especially for the new programmers.
But now Angular has a more streamlined framework that allows programmers to build just the JavaScript classes.
Typescript
Angular is written in TypeScript, a super-set of JavaScript that implements the latest browser features.
And also we have lot of rich editors or IDE’s(Visual Studio Code) where you can install the typescript extension and you can make use of the intellisense which increases your productivity.
Component based architecture
Angular used component based architecture. According to this, an app is divided into independent logical and functional components. These components can easily be replaced and also reused in other parts of the respective application.
Angular CLI
It’s one of the most important reason for using Angular. It has an Angular CLI which automates the whole development process such as app initialization, configuration and development as easy as possible.
Ivy Renderer
It’s a new rendering engine that is going to be expected to launch with Angular 9. The main characteristic of this tool is tree shaking which makes the performance of an Angular app much better. And also during rendering, it removes the unused code.
Detailed documentation
Angular.io provides us an detailed documentation where developers can find all the necessary information needed. And as a result they can quickly come up with technical solutions and resolve emerging issues.
And also it uses AOT compilation which converts TypeScript and HTML into JS during the build process. So these are some of the points that why should you start learning/use Angular.
How to start off with Angular?
If you want to try out angular,
- Install node.js.
- After installing node js, open command prompt as administrator and run the below command
npm install -g @angular/cli
- The above command will install angular cli and if you want create a new angular application,
ng new myFirstAngularApplication
Conclusion
In this blog we have seen an detailed overview of Angular. And also we have some of the key points of why should we use Angular. So in the latest ng conference they mentioned the size of the hello world angular application is going to reduce from,
156 kb to 14 kb
Yes! I know that feels exciting. There are many interesting things happening and will happen in Angular.
In our next blog we will see how we can communicate between the components in Angular.
Happy Coding!
Cheers 😉
DevSuhas 