What Makes Angular a Preferred Choice for Developers?

Many believe that AngularJS is the ‘golden child’ among JavaScript frameworks since Google launched it in 2012. The intent behind creating Angular was to make the front end development process a cakewalk.

It was an instant success since its launch. Keeping note of this success and immense popularity, Google released multiple versions of this framework, with its last stable version being Angular 8.

Today, more than a million developers extensively use Angular worldwide

Owing to the constant support from Google and its broad community forum, Angular is always kept updated. And needless to say, developers love it.

This is a major release from Google, which offers new APIs for tapping into the CLI, enhances app start-up time on modern browsers, and aligns the framework to advanced web standards.

In short, it is powerful, has a great ecosystem, and is really cool.

Currently, it’s a top choice for developing enterprise-grade apps that are highly dynamic and responsive in nature.

Let’s elaborate on some of the features which make Angular so popular globally:

Differential Loading: Apps built with Angular are more structured and efficient, thanks to Differential Loading. This feature lets the browser, in which your application is loaded, decide which works faster – modern JavaScript or legacy JavaScript. That is, the correct bundle automatically gets loaded by the web browser, thereby saving 7-20% of the bundle size and facilitating faster load time. Sounds cool! Doesn’t it?
Router Backwards Compatibility: Angular 8 ensures backward compatibility. This is a feature that helps in hassle-free up-gradation of large Angular projects. It allows you to easily migrate your old Angular apps to a newer Angular version without any trouble. By enabling lazy loading of Angular JS apps through $route APIs, you can easily make seamless transitions from old Angular versions to modern ones.
Ivy Rendering Engine: Ivy is the foundation of future innovations in the world of Angular. It is the latest Angular Compiler, which allows incremental compilation required for better build times and generates codes more compatible with tree-shaking for better build sizes. In a nutshell, this is the ultimate Angular engine, which ensures better debugging, quicker compilations, smaller bundles, and dynamic loading of modules.
Bazel Support: Google has added Bazel in Angular 8 as an opt-in. Creating CLI apps becomes easy with Bazel. This tool can be used to build the back-end and front-end designs. With improved local and distributed caching, enhanced dependency analysis, and parallel execution, Bazel helps in quick and amazing builds. By offering a seamless build interface for multiple languages in a single system, it increases productivity too. With this scalable tool, you can eliminate the overhead of maintaining multiple build systems, which is incredible.
Opt-in Usage Sharing: This feature in Angular 8 helps the Angular team to gather telemetry or data about how the developers use the CLI. This information, covering aspects such as build speed and widely used commands, enable the creators of the Angular framework to make further enhancements. The result? Improved speed of building, testing as well as deployments. The key insights collected from telemetry help the developers refine the app structure for future use.
Web Workers: A significant addition in the front-end development, web workers in Angular 8 help in farming out CPU intensive work to a separate hardware thread. This is fantastic news for the front-end developers because, previously, Angular apps were single-threaded in nature, which was a limitation and often slowed down the page loading speed. But now, the enhancements in the Angular CLI’s web worker, bundling up in Angular 8, removes this awkwardness, thereby increasing efficiency and app speed. In short, developers love the web worker support because it enables easy offloading of large files in the background threads, keeps the main thread free and fast-tracks CPU-heavy tasks.

To sum up, when it comes to a performance boost in front-end development, Angular, is a preferred choice for developers on a global level, thanks to the above features.

And the good news is that Google will make site development easier, simpler, and better for the developers with its upcoming launch – Angular 9.

The New Kid on the Block – Angular 9

In the Angular 9, set to be released soon, the Ivy next-generation compilation and rendering pipeline is the default. Ivy is likely to generate code which is easier to read. It is also expected to ease out debugging at runtime, offer better re-builds, and enhance payload size.

Moreover, tree-shakable sanitization in the Ivy renderer improves Angular’s core performance, which is excellent news for developers who’ll be using version 9.

There are changes related to property binding in Ivy as well, which would speed up the processing time.