It’s been a while since I’ve written about Angular (2 – drop that label, now it’s just Angular) as I’ve been consumed with teaching and developing courseware on a variety of subjects.
But now I am coming up for air, just in time for ng-conf 2017. Three of us from Chariot will be there – me, Rich Freedman, who just posted this gem about Spring Security and Angular (2) (part 2 coming soon), and Dan Kyle, who will be manning our booth in the vendor area.
So, what’s new in Angular these days?
Angular dropped the ‘2’ this year – and so should you
Yes, the Angular team has decided that we should all be calling the new framework “Angular”, and the old one “AngularJS”. That’s fine by me, putting a version number into a product name is dicey long-term. This is being done because the Angular software is being released as new major versions several times per year, and the team is following a Semantic Versioning model.
So, the next time someone says “Do you know Angular 2”, you can hit them with “not only do I know Angular 2, but I’m readying my skills in Angular 4”. 4? Well, the Angular team wants to release major versions in pairs – an unstable version, which I understand will be an odd number, and a stable version, which will be even. I assume we’ll see Angular 3 before the conference and 4 either at or shortly afterward.
Updated documentation – better guides and samples
If you, like me, haven’t looked at the docs much after getting going, there are a few updates in the past two months. First, they revamped the hierarchical dependency injection guide, which explains how the injection tree works. This can be useful when your application is broken up into smaller modules and you want your injection to propagate upward to parent modules.
Next, they’ve upgrade the reactive forms guide, which is good, because our team wrote our training before the guide existed, and I can tell you our courseware developer spent a lot of time digging through code figuring this out! Lots of useful information here, including how to use the Validators object, observing changes, and more.
Check out the updated deployment guide, which gives you information on how Angular can be deployed all the way from a simple non-loader based deployment, to SystemJS, to WebPack and Ahead-of-time compilation (AOT) and rollup (eliminating dead code). This is essential reading for anyone who is in charge of getting an Angular app ready for production.
New seeds and plunkers
There is a relatively new SystemJS QuickStart seed that the team has used to build their downloadable examples. The README of the seed explains how to set it up.
The angular-cli is moving along. If you’ve been using angular-cli as your npm module you can remove it and install @angular/cli. Remember beforehand to properly upgrade. In my view, the easiest way to upgrade an Angular-CLI-based app is to create a brand new app shell alongside the existing one, and move the code / tests into the new location. You then have to patch any changes to package.json for your libraries and other settings, perhaps change your .angular-cli.json file, and other things. But it is better than hand-patching an existing CLI implementation.
The best new thing about the angular-cli is the ability to eject your project from it, and get a webpack project, complete with config files! This is relatively new, and sorely needed.
What’s coming at ng-conf
I don’t know exactly what the Angular team has up their sleeves for ng-conf on April 5-6, but I do see the talk list (ONE YEAR YOU WILL ACCEPT MY TALK, DERN IT!)… Minko Gechev will have a great talk about the Angular compiler, which I’m looking forward to… There’s an updated talk on Animations in 4.0, Shai will have his typically funny roast talk (now called ng-rap, I’m scared, frankly), and there are talks on upgrading from Angular 1.x, where the Angular Material team is with their platform (coming soon?), and more.
See you there or here…
If you’re going to the conference, look us up – we’ll be at the Chariot booth periodically and Dan Kyle can help get you in touch with us at the event. Our Angular training is available for on-site or on-line delivery, and I’d love to strike up a conversation and discuss your needs.
If you don’t get to the conference, I plan on having some posts online this week on RxJS and Angular, and also will cover the conference both in podcast and post form. You can always reach me on twitter at @RimpleOnTech, or contact us for information on our training or consulting.