Why choose Angular?
The choice of technology to be used in a given project is critical to its success. You, as a project developer or architect, must help your team in this mission by choosing the best tool for the job.
The Angular framework is one of the most used tools for building a single-page application, along with React and Vue. When choosing the right tool for the job, you need to answer why.
The following are some arguments for choosing Angular.
Batteries included
Angular is an opinionated framework, which means that the Angular development team has already made several choices of tools and solutions for every challenge that a web application can have. This way, you and your team don’t have to research which route engine or state management library you should use; it’s all included and configured for your project.
This feature also simplifies the onboarding of new developers in your team. Following the guidelines proposed by the documentation and using the best practices, Angular projects usually have the same structure and method of development. Knowing Angular you can quickly locate yourself in any ongoing project.
Google support
Angular was created and maintained by the Angular team at Google. Although excellent frameworks such as Vue.js and Svelte are maintained only by their communities, having such a big tech company supporting the framework brings security to the choice of technology, especially for large companies.
In addition, Angular is used in more than 300 internal applications and Google products, which means stability and quality because, before each new version of the framework is released, it is validated in all these applications.
The Angular team has strived since version 13 to increase transparency within the community by releasing a roadmap (https://angular.io/guide/roadmap) detailing all the improvements in progress and what to expect for the future of the framework, giving you peace of mind that it will be supported for years to come.
Community
Technology is only as alive as the community that supports it, and Angular has a huge one. Meetups, podcasts, events, articles, and videos – the Angular community has many resources to help developers.
The people who make up this community also have the important contribution of giving feedback, creating and correcting issues in Angular. As it is an open source project, everyone is invited to evaluate and contribute to the code.
The Angular team also asks the community for help with major framework decisions through Requests for Comment (RFCs).
In addition, the community creates many libraries that expand the possibilities of the framework, such as NgRx (https://ngrx.io/) for advanced state management and Transloco (https://ngneat.github.io/transloco/) to support internationalization, among others.
Tooling
One of the differentiating factors of Angular compared to its competitors is the focus from the beginning on tooling and developer experience. The Angular CLI tool is a powerful productivity tool that we will explore in this chapter, which is used far beyond the simple creation and setup of a project.
From a testing point of view, Angular is already equipped and configured with Karma as a test runner and Jasmine as a configuration tool. Angular’s tooling already configures the project build using webpack and already has a dev server.
The tool is also extensible, allowing the community to create routines for configuring and updating their libraries.
With these arguments, you will be able to base your choice of Angular on your project; let’s see now which technologies make up the framework’s ecosystem.
