Angular’s Architecture and Concepts
Angular is a popular Single-Page Application (SPA) framework for building web applications. It is often preferred in enterprise application development because it is an opinionated, batteries-included framework that supports type-checking with TypeScript and concepts like Dependency Injection (DI) that allow for engineering scalable solutions by large teams. In contrast, React is a flexible and unopinionated library rather than a complete framework, requiring developers to pick their flavor from the community to build fully featured applications.
React is undoubtedly the more popular choice of the two. The numbers don’t lie. React’s easier learning curve and deceptively small and simple starting point have attracted the attention of many developers. The many “Angular vs React” articles you have undoubtedly encountered online add to the confusion. These articles are usually too shallow, often contain misleading information about Angular, and lack insights into the very bright future of Angular.
This chapter aims to give you a deeper understanding of why Angular exists, the variety of patterns and paradigms you can leverage to solve complex problems, and, later in the book, the pitfalls to avoid as you scale your solution. It’s important to take your time to read through this material because every journey begins with a choice. The real story of your choice today can only be written several years into a project when it’s too late and expensive to switch technologies.
This chapter covers the following topics:
- Two Angulars
- A brief history of web frameworks
- Angular and the philosophies behind it
- Component architecture
- Reactive programming
- Modular architecture
- Standalone architecture
- Angular Router
- State management
- React.js architecture
- The future of Angular
Chapter 2, Forms, Observables, Signals, and Subjects, covers Angular fundamental concepts and building blocks. Chapter 3, Architecting an Enterprise App, covers technical, architectural, and tooling concerns for delivering large applications. With Chapter 4, Creating a Router-First Line-of-Business App, we dive into creating scalable Angular applications ready for the enterprise.
Each chapter introduces new concepts and progressively builds on best practices while covering optimal working methods with popular open-source tools. Along the way, tips and information boxes provide additional background and history, numbered steps, and bullet points that describe actions you need to take.
The code samples provided in this book have been developed using Angular 17. Since the second edition, significant changes occurred in the JavaScript and Angular ecosystems. The transition to Angular’s Ivy engine meant some third-party tools stopped working. ESLint has superseded TSLint. Karma and Jasmine have become outdated and superseded by Jest or the more modern Vitest. Significant headway was made in replacing commonjs modules with ES modules (ESM). The totality of these changes meant that much of the second edition’s supporting tools were beyond repair. As a lesson learned, the example projects now utilize minimal tooling to allow for the best possible DevEx with the least possible amount of npm packages installed. The core samples of the book, which intentionally avoided third-party libraries, were initially written for Angular 5 and have survived the test of time. This book adopts the Angular Evergreen motto and encourages incremental, proactive, and timely upgrades of your dependencies to maintain the health of your project and your team.
This book is supported by the companion site https://AngularForEnterprise.com. Visit the site for the latest news and updates.
The world of JavaScript, TypeScript, and Angular is constantly changing. To maintain consistency for my readers, I published a collection of open-source projects that support the content of the book:
Figure 1.1: Code developed in support of this book
The diagram above shows you the moving parts that make up the technical content supporting this book. Each component is detailed in the coming chapters. The code samples contain chapter-by-chapter snapshots and the final state of the code. The most up-to-date versions of the sample code for the book are on GitHub at the repositories linked below:
- For Chapters 2 and 9, LocalCast Weather: https://github.com/duluca/local-weather-app
- For Chapters 4 to 10, Lemon Mart: https://github.com/duluca/lemon-mart
- For Chapter 5, Lemon Mart Server: https://github.com/duluca/lemon-mart-server
You may read more about updating Angular in the supplemental reading, Keeping Angular and Tools Evergreen, available at https://angularforenterprise.com/evergreen.
Now that you’re oriented with the book’s structure and supporting content, and before we dive into a prolonged history of the web, let’s first disambiguate the two major architectures of Angular and the underlying themes that motivated a dramatic rewrite of the framework in 2016.
