Why choose Angular?
The power of the Angular platform is based on the combination of the following characteristics:
- The main pillars of the platform: cross-platform, incredible tooling, and easy onboarding
- The usage of Angular worldwide
In the following sections, we will examine each characteristic in more detail.
Cross-platform
Angular applications can run on different platforms: web, server, desktop, and mobile. Angular can run natively only on the web because it is a JavaScript framework. However, it is open-source and is backed by a vast and incredible community that enables the framework to run on the remaining three using the following integrations:
- Angular Universal: Renders Angular applications server-side
- Angular Service Worker: Enables Angular applications to run as Progressive Web Applications (PWA) that are customizable and can be installed on a desktop environment
- Ionic Framework: Allows us to build mobile applications using Angular
The next pillar of the framework describes the tooling available in the Angular ecosystem.
Tooling
The Angular team has built two great tools that make Angular development easy and fun:
- Angular CLI: A command-line interface that allows us to work with Angular projects from creation to deployment.
- Angular DevTools: A browser extension that enables us to debug and profile Angular applications from the comfort of our browser. We will learn more about this tool in Chapter 14, Handling Errors and Application Debugging.
The Angular CLI is the de facto solution for working with Angular applications. It allows the developer to focus on writing application code, eliminating the boilerplate of configuration tasks such as scaffolding, building, testing, and deploying an Angular application.
Onboarding
It is simple and easy for a web developer to start with Angular development because when we install Angular, we also get a rich collection of first-party libraries out of the box, including:
- Angular HTTP client to communicate with a REST API endpoint over HTTP
- Angular forms to create HTML forms for collecting input and data from users
- Angular router to perform in-app navigations
A first-party library is a library that is provided from the Angular framework out of the box without the need to install it separately.
The preceding libraries are installed by default when we create a new Angular application using the Angular CLI. However, they are not used in our application unless we import them explicitly into our project.
Who uses Angular?
Many companies use Angular for their websites and web applications. The website https://www.madewithangular.com contains an extensive list of those companies, including some popular ones.
Statistically, more than 2,500 projects inside Google use the Angular framework. Additionally, more than 1.5 million developers worldwide prefer Angular for web development.
The fact that Angular is already used internally at Google is a crucial factor for the reliability of the platform. Every new version of Angular is first thoroughly tested in those projects before becoming available to the public. The testing process helps the Angular team catch bugs early and delivers a top-quality platform to the rest of the developer community.
Now that we have already seen what Angular is and why someone should choose it for web development, we will learn how to use it and start building great web applications.
