7 Convincing reasons to choose angular 8 for your next web development project
With the rising popularity of the eCommerce industry, no investor would risk by ignoring it’s worth as every organization is struggling to leave a mark behind on the internet. With this quest of getting the limelight in the eCommerce pool, the demand for web developers has increased significantly.
With the rising popularity of the eCommerce industry, no investor would risk ignoring its worth as every organization is struggling to leave a mark behind on the internet. With this quest of getting the limelight in the eCommerce pool, the demand for web developers has increased significantly.
A recent study has given a lucrative figure of about 1.7 billion websites in the world and still, the count is on. With multiple options for web development platforms in the market, Angular has always been one of the top choices.
Every search about Angular bombards you with a vast amount of information, often that is not easily digested.
Staying behind in this cut-throat competition isn’t feasible. Moreover, the front-end development will keep growing. Therefore, this blog is for people with the zeal to learn about the scope of Angular in the upcoming year in a limited time constraint.
In this post, we will have an overview of:
- What is on the shelf for you?
- Why Angular 8 deserves all the limelight?
- The top features of Angular 8
- Upcoming trends with Angular 8 for 2020
Let us dive into the details.
What is on the shelf for you?
Angular’s current Engineering Manager Brad Green at ng-conf 2019 stated that there is a rise of about 50% in Angular adoption since last year.
Though these stats may be inflated due to the projects that are in the process of getting an upgrade from the older versions, there is a significant growth in the demand of Angular.
If you are looking for a platform that provides quality client-side front-end mobile app development and desktop web apps, then Angular is all that you need. Angular 8 is a popular, open-source, and TypeScript framework that is compiled into JavaScript.
With the latest version of Angular known as Angular 8, dynamic web applications can be created. It has also introduced some extensive features as compared to the previous versions.
It is not deniable that Angular isn’t fast-growing like Vue and not widely used as React, but Angular has its own state of identification and in high demand by millions of web developers and teams.
Moreover Angular has a wide ecosystem including:
- High-quality and large community
- Deep Integration
- Fast-growing tools like Bazel
- State management libraries of different flavors
- Code Quality toolings, such as Codelyzer
- UI libraries, Components, Directives, Pipes, etc.
- Large IDE plugins repositories
- Testing Frameworks and utility libraries
- Both the community and the Angular team provide extensive documentation concerning best practices, guides, tutorials, books, video courses, etc.
So, the next-big-thing for web development is Angular and here are the reasons to pin this.
Why Angular 8 deserves all the limelight?
1. TypeScript
TypeScript is used to built Angular applications. It is a superset of JavaScript.
Features of TypeScript:
- Higher security
- Detects and eliminates errors at early stages
- Not a stand-alone language
- Direct debug on the browser or editor
- Easy opt-out for the feature if needed.
- Ensures improved navigation
- Improved refactoring and auto-completion services.
2. Declarative UI
The UI of the application is defined by HTML that in turn is used by Angular. Unlike JavaScript, HTML is a less complex language. It has declarative and intuitive properties. All you have to do is frame the requirements and let Angular do the rest of the work. You are not supposed to spend a lot of time in program flows and in deciding what loads first.
3. MVVM Architecture
To develop robust and interactive developing web applications, Angular makes use of MVVM architecture. It is the modern structure of the MVC pattern. Due to this reason, the focus remains the same for MVVM like MVC implementation where you will require to split the domain logic and the presentation layer.
MVVM architecture is involved in:
- Data Maintenance
- Displaying of data
- Accountable view
- Connection establishment through the between view and model by the ViewModel.
4. Consistent Code
Only a writer knows the importance of consistency in their content pieces. We will face a bleeding edge of competition if any content fails to resonate with the readers at certain touch points leading to less or no lead conversions. Coding is not a different subject than this.
With the increasing inconsistency factor of coding gives rise to the delayed launches or increased costs. Consistent coding welcomes multiple benefits like easy usage of sites, templates or pre-defined snippets.
Based on the components, the angular framework provides the following benefits:
Reusability: Since Angular is based on a component structure, these components are highly reusable across the app.
Simplified Unit-testing: Unit testing is made simple due to the non-dependency factor of each other.
Improved Readability: Reading code becomes eye-pleasing due to the consistency of code. This adds to the productivity of the new developers for an ongoing project.
Easy Maintenance: With better implementations, decoupled components are replaceable thus enabling efficient code maintenance and update.
5. Modular Structure
Angular organize the code into buckets or modules. These buckets may be components, directives, pipes, or services. The functionality of the application can easily be organized with modules. The application is segregated into features and reusable chunks. Lazy loading of the modules is permitted paving the way for loading application features in the background or on-demand. With Angular, the labor is divided across multiple team members with organized code assurance.
6. Google Support
Google developers provide great support to Angular for its development and maintenance. With Google’s Long-term Support(LTS), it is clear about the intention of Google’s plan of sticking and scaling on the Angular ecosystem catering to the day-to-day requirements. The angular framework is used by Google apps. The team is very optimistic about the stability of Angular.
7. Community Support
With large support from a community of skilled engineers, Angular is built and maintained by them. This community houses both the core development team and the ones with technical expertise with a guest appearance in the community to enhance the performance by fixing the issues.
There are multiple conferences held globally and is discussed worldwide about the possible improvements and requirements. The internet is loaded with resources on Angular for enthusiasts.
So, if you have some Angular questions unanswered, you have access to some ace Engineers who would assist you. Thus, you are a part of a huge community of Angular.
The Top Features of Angular 8
With the release of Angular 8, multiple improvements and features are introduced. Whether you are any angular development company or angular developer or anyone who is looking for an upgrade, Angular is making projects faster and smaller with every improvement thus driving the developer and user experience to the next level of perfection.
1. Differential Loading
In spite of angular being a complete framework with its own package for a network request, form validation, and many more, Angular has one disadvantage-the app/bundle size.
The challenge that we were facing with Angular 7 was the large bundle size due to the conversion of modern JS/TS code in JS. After the conversion, the final application bundle is created for all the browsers (new and old) concerning the app performance on all the browsers.
This challenge of large bundle size was overcome in Angular 8 by reducing the bundle size by the concept of differential loading.
When we build apps with ng build, two separate bundles are created for the production dedicated to the older and newer browsers respectively. The correct bundle gets loaded automatically by the browser, thus improving the performance for Angular 8 by loading less code by the newer browsers.
2. Ivy Renderer
According to a source, 63% of all US traffic comes from smartphones and tablets. It is further forecasted that the number will increase to 80% by the end of this year.
One of the biggest challenges for a front end developer is increasing the loading speed of the website. Unfortunately, mobile devices always stay behind in this race either due to slow or bad internet connectivity thus making it more challenging for the developers.
But we never run out of solutions. We can use CDN, PWA, and others for loading the application faster. But if you want to have some out of the box solution, then reducing the bundle size is the ultimate solution and thus, IVY comes into the picture.
IVY is meant to build a next-generation rendering pipeline for Angular 8.0
Ivy is an angular renderer that uses incremental DOM. Ivy modifies the working of the framework without any changes to the Angular applications. On completion of IVY, the angular applications become small, simple, and faster. IVY consists of two main concepts:
- Tree shakable: To focus only on the code in use, the unused code is removed. This results in faster runtime and smaller bundles.
- Local: For a faster compilation, the changing components are recompiled.
The benefits of Ivy are:
- Bundles are smaller
- Templates are debuggable
- Tests are faster
- Builds are faster
- Lots of bugs fixed
It rewrites the Angular compiler and runtime code to reach:
- Better compatibility with tree-shaking
- Improved build times
- Improvised build sizes
- Loaded with features like lazy loading of components rather than modules.
3. Web Workers
With the newest release of Angular v8, web workers can now be easily integrated with Angular. Though you might be aware of web workers, let us have a small brush up. As defined by Sitepoint,
“Web workers is an asynchronous system, or protocol, for web pages to execute tasks in the background, independently from the main thread and website UI. It is an isolated environment that is insulated from the window object, the document object, direct internet access and is best suited for long-running or demanding computational tasks.”
Have you built an application that includes a lot of calculations on UI? Are you experiencing the UI to be slow?
Having heavy calculations, data table manipulations, and other complex computations results in a laggy UI. JavaScript running on the main thread is not the only thing. Other things like calculations also run on it thus resulting in a bad user experience. Thus, web workers come into the picture to resolve this issue.
Therefore you can say if your application is unresponsive while processing data, web workers are helpful.
Due to JavaScript being single-threaded, there is a possibility of asynchronous data calls to take place. Facilitating to run the CPU intensive computations in the background thread, Web workers are used. This is achieved by freeing the main thread and updating the user interface.
Put simply, web workers are useful if heavy computations are offloaded to another thread.
4. Lazy Loading
Lazy loading helps in bringing down the size of large files. The required files are lazily loaded.
Previously in the older versions of Angular, @loadChildren property was used by the route configuration. This property accepts a string. If any typo occurred or any module name has been recorded wrong, Angular doesn’t consider this as wrong. It accepts the value that was there until we try building it.
To overcome this, dynamic imports in router configuration is added in Angular 8 thus enabling the usage of import statement for lazy loading the module. Thus, errors will be easily recognized and we can put a stop on waiting till the build time to recognize the errors in the code.
5. Bazel Support
Now increase the possibilities to build your CLI application with Bazel. The Angular framework is built with Bazel. Since it is expected to be included in version 9, it is available as opt-in in Angular 8.
The main advantages of Bazel are:
- Using the same tool in building backends and frontends.
- The build time is faster
- Incremental build for the modified part.
- Ejection of hidden Bazel files that are hidden by default.
- Cache on the build farm
- Dynamic imports for the lazy loaded modules
6. CLI Improvements
With continuous improvement in the Angular CLI, the ng build, ng test and ng run has accorded themselves by 3rd-party libraries and tools. For example, with the help of a deploy command, the new capabilities are already in use by AngularFire.
Angular CLI is equipped with commands such as ng new, serve, test, build and add for quicker development experience.
With the new ng deploy in the house, developers can deploy their final app to the cloud. Just a few clicks from their command-line interface and the work is done.
One important thing to remember, add a builder as it accords your project’s deployment capability to a specific hosting provider. But, this has to be done before using the command.
With Angular 8, it has added new features to ngUpgrade. This new feature will make the life of developers easier for upgrading their Angular.js apps to Angular 8.
7. TypeScript 3.4
The most important part is TypeScript 3.4 as it is required to run your Angular 8 project. A new flag is introduced in TypeScript 3.4 known as –incremental.
From the last compilation, the TypeScript is asked to save the information of the project graph by the incremental. Every time –incremental invokes TypeScript, it will utilize the information for detecting the cheapest way of type-checking and emit changes to your project.
A quick overview of the top features of Angular 8 is well explained in the Google Summit. Have a look at the video.
Upcoming Trends with Angular 8 for 2020
Being one of the most popular software development instruments today, Angular has received a lot of recommendations and recognition from the development community all over the world.
With the rise in popularity of using Angular for building user interfaces, the development community has grown. Heading towards 2020, Angular has a lot for the industries and thus is giving us the opportunity to explore its functionalities, features, and benefits for web and mobile app development.
1. Enterprise web apps
The global clientele is always expecting a robust Enterprise web application with the latest framework and codes adhering to the guidelines. The Enterprise web applications should be developed in such a way that they are business-driven, highly-optimized, and user-centric thus enhancing the growth of the business.
With the release of Angular latest version, the expectations of getting these things fulfilled increased as it was written in TypeScript and TypeScript has the following capabilities:
- Navigation features
- Advanced refactoring
- Auto-completion
- Code reusability
- easy maintenance.
2. Progressive web apps (PWAs)
Imagine yourself in an area with no network reception. You want to search for a nearby bookstore. Your web app has everything you wanted but can’t work when you are offline. Every time you lose the network, you experience a stall in the application. Moreover, a typical web application would load all of its scripts before starting up. This will result in a wait for at least a minute or more for the first-page load. Ultimately, it will result in abandoning the application.
To avoid this, PWA comes into the picture.
With the capacity to provide a smooth user-experience in areas with no network coverage, they utilize the current browser technologies. They use service workers. These service workers act a bit like proxy intercepting the network requests and caching the responses. The entire application is permitted to be installed in the client’s browser. Thus, the user can utilize the application being offline.
Introduced by Google in 2015, the forecast of Progressive Web Apps(PWAs) gaining popularity with Angular by the Angular development team is soon to be realized.
Wrapping it Up!
Why Angular is used for web and mobile app development shouldn’t be an unanswerable question now. With its high-quality and rich ecosystem, Angular has gained a lot of attention this year and is forecasted to remain in demand for the coming years. The current state of Angular 8 has been proving its endless demand among the businesses and developers due to the capacity of providing faster and smaller applications. With the release of the latest versions of Angular, the expectation is rising higher due to the increasing capability of the framework.