Angular is one of the most popular tools for making software today. It is part of the JavaScript ecosystem. People in the development world really liked it when Google introduced it in 2009. A survey on StackOverflow in 2022 found that 23% of software workers use the framework to make user interfaces. Let’s talk about the main features of these tools and what’s good and bad about them from a front-end tech point of view.
A Brief History of Angular
Angular is an open-source, JS-based software engineering platform for making user interfaces (front-end). It is backed by Google. According to its background, Google engineers Misko Hevery and Adam Abrons created the framework called AngularJS in 2009. It was made public in 2010.
AngularJS changed the way web developers worked by making it easy to make interactive single-page apps (SPAs).
One HTML file makes up this kind of app; it runs in the browser and doesn’t need to be reloaded every time a user changes something on the page. It gets the right information from the server and updates a part of the UI on the fly when a button is clicked or some other event happens, instead of making everything from scratch. Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, GitHub, and many other sites we use every day are all well-known SPAs.
It takes a lot of time to use pure or vanilla JavaScript to make complex interactive web pages. The front-end is also hard to learn and keep up to date for big projects with a lot of programmers. So, the main idea behind AngularJS was to make SPA development easier by adding a number of important benefits.
- The MVC design
With AngularJS, your web app is split into three separate parts: Model (data), View (the user interface), and Controller (business logic). The three units can be built at the same time and tried separately. This makes the code simpler to understand, keep up to date, and add to.
- Data bound both ways
A two-way data binding method is used by the JavaScript framework to keep the Model and the View in sync. The View changes along with the facts in the Model. This cuts down on development time because coders don’t have to write extra code to keep the View and Model in sync all the time.
- Dependency Injection (DI).
Dependencies are rules that tell pieces of code how to deal with each other and what to do in certain situations. AngularJS has a built-in way to pass (inject) dependencies instead of creating them inside the components. This lets writers change or set up dependencies without changing an app module, and they can also use the same dependencies in more than one module. In general, DI makes testing easier and helps make app parts more reusable and easier to manage.
AngularJS became very famous very quickly because it had a lot of useful features. But, sadly for the structure, technologies changed even more quickly. Soon, the platform could no longer keep up with the changing needs of the web, and it lost ground to new competitors that kept popping up like flowers after it rained. It wasn’t possible to save the day with constant changes. In 2014, Google chose to write it all over again.
AngularJS and its replacement, which is just called Angular, have been around for a while now. But in 2022, it finally hits its end of life, which means that the community will no longer be able to keep up with it. Still, dedicated users can still get help from outside sources, and AngularJS code will stay on GitHub.
Angular JS vs. Angular
Google put out Angular 2 in September 2016. The old version of AngularJS and the new version were so different that you couldn’t just switch between them. Here are the most important changes.
Angular is different from its predecessor, which was built on JavaScript. It uses TypeScript, which is a stricter version of JavaScript made by Microsoft for making big apps.
Parts are like the building blocks of anything. With the help of directives—HTML extensions that tell an element how to behave—AngularJS writers can make code that can be used again and again. Angular took all standard directives and made them its own main building blocks by adding reusable, self-sufficient components. To put it simply, a component is a command that is linked to an HTML template and tells the browser what to show on the page.
Here are the biggest improvements to Angular:
- Much Better Results
AngularJS and Angular both cut development time by a large amount. The component-based design and better data binding in Angular apps, on the other hand, can make them five times faster than AngularJS apps.
- Command Line Interface (CLI)
It’s not possible for AngularJS to have its own command line interface (CLI). That being said, Angular 2+ has a command line interface (CLI) that makes it easy to make components, services, directives, and other things quickly.
- Mobile-Friendluy
Mobile devices were not taken into account when AngularJS was made. Google thought about this gap when they made Angular, so the new framework works with both mobile web and native mobile apps.
Pros and Cons of Angular
Now that we’ve covered the history of Angular and established a good background of the platform, let’s find out what to consider before deciding if Angular is the right choice for your project.
Pros of Angular
- The platform-agnostic way of thinking.
When Angular was made, it was made to be flexible and work on multiple platforms. It works with iOS and Android browsers as a web framework, and companies can use the same codebase and engineers for both web and mobile apps, or they can go for the mobile-first method.
In 2015, Angular writers worked with the people who made the NativeScript framework, which is for making apps that are like native apps on phones. When you use NativeScript UI components to make mobile interfaces, your developers will be working in settings they are already familiar with, like JavaScript and Angular. It won’t take them long to learn how to work with a mobile.
- Component-based design that makes developers more productive and leads to better code.
One way to think of Angular components is as small parts of a user experience, or sections of an app. In Angular, there is a strict order of components, and each one is wrapped up with its own set of functions.
In this case, the parts of an eCommerce app are called components. The application is a parent component that holds a shopping cart and a menu list. Following suit, the menu list has its child components, and each menu item also has an item explanation component. What you just saw is called component structure.
The component-based design makes it possible to build UIs with lots of moving parts and speeds up the development process for engineers.
- “RxJS” is fast, asynchronous programming.
As we already said, RxJS is a tool that is often used with Angular to handle data calls that happen at different times. Thinkster says to look at RxJS for JavaScript code like Henry Ford’s assembly line for making cars. It lets events be handled separately and at the same time, and processing can go on without having to wait for an event to happen, which would make a web page unresponsive.
In theory, this works like an assembly line, where work is broken up into separate, replaceable parts that aren’t tied to a single person. There was already asynchronous programming before RxJS, but this library has made a lot of things easy.
Despite the fact that many engineers complain about how hard it is to learn RxJS, the tool really shines once you get the hang of it. Observables are like blueprints that show how data streams are put together and how the program responds to variables in these streams. They are used by the library.
Once you understand Observables, they’re like Lego blocks: they’re easy to reuse, handle, and combine. This makes programming tasks like adding drag-and-drop features, handling large amounts of data in chunks, and simpler. You can use RxJS with other frameworks that handle front-end (React) or back-end (Node.js) tasks, but you have to use it with Angular, which we’ll talk about in the cons part as well.
- TypeScript has better tools, cleaner code, and more scaling.
TypeScript is the language Angular is written in. It fully compiles to JavaScript and helps you find and fix common typing errors. Small JavaScript projects don’t need improvement, but enterprise-level app writers must clean up their code and check its quality more often.
Angular’s strategy of putting TypeScript first is something that many engineers would argue about when it comes to the benefits section. From time to time, people in the development industry have problems with TypeScript. Engineers need to learn yet another language. TypeScript is there for a reason, though, and you can still use JavaScript if you want to.
- Google provides world-class support and instructions.
There are software experts who think that the fact that Google supports Angular is one of its best features. There’s a reason for that. Tech giant Google builds its own tools and websites for the public, like Google Cloud Platform and AdWords, on top of the structure. It keeps adding new features, provides strong technical support for developers, and keeps clear, full documentation to help everyone learn the technology.
- High speed thanks to built-in tools.
There are several things that can help speed up your application. The main boost comes from Angular tools like Ivy renderer, differential load, hierarchy dependency injection, and more.
Injecting dependencies into a hierarchy. Hierarchical dependency injection is better in Angular. By running them at the same time, the method separates the real parts from their dependencies. Angular creates a different tree of dependency injectors that can be changed without having to re-configure the parts. In other words, classes don’t have relationships on their own; they get them from outside sources.
This method gives Angular applications good performance scores. As the Angular team says, Angular 2 was five times faster than AngularJS, and engineers say that newer versions have made it even faster.
- Angular CLI changes that work without a hitch.
Many engineers like the Angular command-line tool for different reasons. Also, it’s simple to use, comes with testing tools right out of the box, and is easy for beginners to set up.
The command NG update is one of the great benefits. It looks at the package and tells you what changes might be needed for all its dependencies, such as loaders and plugins. Some code updates that depend on third-party products can be made immediately by the third party if, say, they decide to fix something in their products. On the Angular Update Guide page, you can see how this works.
The same goes for Angular itself. There must be an easy way to update Angular itself that doesn’t break anything, since the team releases new versions every six months, which is pretty fast. Your framework tools, TypeScript, and RxJS will be up to date after running ng update @angular/core.
- Ecosystem that works well.
Angular has been around for a long time, so many packages, apps, add-ons, and development tools have been made for it. The list of Angular Resources lets you look at some of the work that other people have done. Some of these are IDEs, tooling, UI environments, the Angular Universal for server-side rendering we talked about above, analytics tools, ASP.NET facilities, data libraries, and more.
There’s always a tool that can help an engineer figure out what they need to do if they get lost.
- Angular Material components to make UIs look good.
This is a cool set of visual features that can be used to make UIs for Android, iOS, Flutter, and web apps. You’ll be glad to know that the Angular team has been adding Material Design parts to their framework all the time. This library is great because it considers how people use digital goods and tries to make their experience smooth and nice.
Angular Material gives you a wide range of pre-made components, such as form controls, navigation elements, layouts, buttons and signs, popups, modal windows, data tables, and more. They work well with Angular and are simple to add to a project.
Cons of Angular
If you’ve been paying attention to all the talk and hype about Angular, you may know that the technology gets a lot of bad press. Let’s look at the main problems that should also be thought about.
AngularJS and Angular are very different, and moving from the old to the new is not that simple. It won’t be as easy as changing from, say, Angular 13 to Angular 14. This is especially true if you’re working with a very old version.
To transition, one option is to use a mixed method. It means running both the old and new versions of Angular at the same time while you update the whole thing in small steps. For starters, it takes time. You’ll also need to learn a new language, review a lot of tools, and deal with a heavier app while both Angulars are working.
A different method that can be used during the transfer is known as “lazy loading.” Lazy loading is a way to make things run faster by only loading the parts of the app (or its information) that the user asked for. When the part or function is needed, Angular would use that part of the app and display it. Parts of the AngularJS app can be called up and shown inside the Angular app with lazy loading.
- Angular is long and hard to understand.
The Angular development community’s main issue is that the tool is too verbose. The issue is still the same since AngularJS.
We’ve talked about how the main benefit of Angular is its component-based design, but the way components are managed is too hard to understand. And in Angular, you might need up to five files for a single component. You must also describe the component lifecycle interfaces and inject dependencies. Third-party tools that only work with Angular and the syntax for Angular are also things to be aware of. When working on Angular, much of the time is spent doing the same things repeatedly.
- Community that is split and moving around.
The people who use a tool are what make it strong in the market. And the story about the Angular group is very controversial. An interesting fact from the 2018 StackOverflow Developer Survey is that Angular (both AngularJS and Angular) was the second most popular technology in the area of Frameworks, Libraries, and Other Technologies. In 2019, the same study found that Angular and AngularJS fell to ninth place among the most popular frameworks, with 53% of those polled saying they used it.
When it comes to popularity, Angular is number five and AngularJS is number thirteen. Almost half of those who answered hate the younger framework, but the other half love it. For the third year in a row, AngularJS is still the most “dreaded” technology.
- There’s a tough learning curve.
If you teach new developers who already know JavaScript how to use Angular, it will be harder for them than teaching them React or Vue in the same way. A lot of different things need to be talked about, such as modules, the dependency injection we talked about earlier, components, services, templates, and more.
RxJS, a tool for reactive programming that lets you work on code at different times, is another problem. If you want to use Angular, you have to learn it, at least the basics. Engineers complain that error messages are too hard to understand without doing more study and trying different things.
A lot of people don’t like TypeScript, as we already said in the part on benefits. TypeScript makes code easier to manage, but learning it doesn’t make the learning curve easier.
Angular: Why Use It
If you read through different feedback posts from the development community, you’d probably find more complaints than happy things. But we don’t think that badly of Angular. It has never been as famous as React, but it still does a great job of what it needs to do.
Best Application: Built For Businesses
Because TypeScript makes code easier to maintain, Angular’s performance score goes up as you make more complex apps, and the ecosystem choices you can make make it the best tool for long-term, high-investment projects where a steep learning curve is balanced by stability and ongoing tech support.
Also, this is the main difference between the new Angular and React that you might want to think about. This one is simpler to understand, set up, and use, but it’s not as flexible or easy to keep up to date as Angular.
Conclusion
When it comes to developing feature-rich web apps, the Angular framework is among the most popular options to consider. Because of this, developers can get a lot out of it.
Many companies favor Angular for their internal processes and for users outside of the company. The stability of Angular makes it a popular choice for front-end development and enterprise web application development. Angular is without a question the best framework for building web apps thanks to its features and broad compatibility.
Building robust and scalable web applications is possible with the help of experienced Angular developers. ClinkIT Solutions is an 8x Gold Microsoft Partner with a thorough knowledge of Angular’s best practices and coding standards. They have proven eligibility and expertise on many competencies including Cloud Platform and Application Development. For any further details, feel free to get in touch with us!
