Introducing Angular
Angular is a free and open source JavaScript framework that’s maintained by Google. It was built mainly for developing web applications and has expanded its capabilities to being used to create mobile and desktop applications using plugins. Angular uses component-based code, is progressive, and offers many libraries and extensions that shorten the time of developing large-scale applications.
At the time of writing, Angular is very popular for building frontend applications. It is the primary framework for developing applications for large and well-known companies such as Samsung, Upwork, PayPal, and Google. It also has a very active community and has 76,000 stars on GitHub, with around 1,500 people contributing to the framework. In addition, it has thousands of functional NPM libraries that you can use to speed up your development.
History of Angular
Before it became Angular, the first developed framework by Google was AngularJS or Angular Version 1. Although developers are typically confused by this, due to thinking that AngularJS and Angular are similar, AngularJS was released as an open source framework by Miško Hevery, a Google employee, who was developing AngularJS to develop web applications faster.
AngularJS, where you use JavaScript or Dart, became popular as its community became more extensive. At the same time, the Ionic framework was released, which allowed developers to use AngularJS to build native mobile applications.
The Great Rewrite
The fast and rapid development of JavaScript technology has affected the popularity of AngularJS, and the team came to the end of the road regarding the framework – no improvements were to be made. From 2014 to 2015, the Google team and the community decided to support mobile and large enterprise applications with the framework. Their first port of call was The Great Rewrite and not incrementing the design of AngularJS. The Great Rewrite is where Angular 2.0, or simply Angular, was released.
The problem with action
Many applications were already running on AngularJS, which meant that if a completely new version of Angular was released, support would come to an end for AngularJS users. So, another main question here was, "How would those applications be supported after several years?"
The other issue that emerged is that there was no direct way to migrate from AngularJS to Angular 2.0, which was difficult for developers. This was a massive step for teams – so much so that new concepts and breaking changes were introduced on every release.
The framework’s comeback
Even though migrating Angular was painful, the enterprise applications that had been created by Google were supported. Around 2018, this became more stabilized as the framework had a large set of features that were ready to be used to build large applications. In addition, it didn’t depend on third-party libraries to create forms and call HTTP requests because all the dependencies were already included. Google also released some documentation to help developers migrate AngularJS to the latest version of Angular.
Angular is very popular and is very effective at developing enterprise applications. Now, let’s look at the advantages of Angular and why it is effective for development.
