The world of web development is evolving rapidly and web developers have no option but to stay abreast of the latest trends in this field. One of the most popular technologies in this field is AngularJS. It boasts of being the first framework that facilitated the development of interactive webpages. Even MEAN stack developers need to take AngularJS training (A in MEAN) apart from MongoDB database, Express.js, and Node.js.
As the official Angular website says, Angular is an app-design framework and development platform that is used to create efficient and sophisticated single-page applications. Launched by Google in 2010, AngularJS is the first version of Angular described as an open-source front-end web application framework purely written in JavaScript used for dynamic web application development.
Today, the term ‘AngularJS’ refers to all the 1.x versions, and the term ‘Angular’ refers to Angular Version 2 and above. Here is a quick reference to all these versions of Angular:
- Angular 2 – Released on September 14, 2016
- Angular 4 – Released on March 23, 2017
- Angular 5 – Released on November 1, 2017
- Angular 6 – Released on May 4, 2018
- Angular 7 – Released on October 18, 2018
- Angular 8 – Released on May 28, 2019
- Angular 9 – Released on February 06, 2020
As the technology advances, trends in web application development keep on changing and so Angular too keeps on evolving to ensure that the foundation that its clients are building upon is continuously improving and taking care of the user needs.
AngularJS was developed by Misko Hevery to handle the limitations of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and lets you use HTML as your template language and extend HTML’s syntax to express the components of an application clearly. While HTML is suited for declaring static documents, it cannot be used when developers are trying to declare dynamic views in web applications.
It is AngularJS that works well with other libraries and the features it offers can be modified to suit the developer’s unique development workflow. The resulting environment is, therefore, expressive, easy to develop, and gives better readability.
The AngularJS architecture is based on the model-view-controller (MVC) design:
- Model – a central component that represents the behavior of the application and responsible for managing its data, logic, and rules
- View – responsible for generating the output as per the information present in the model
- Controller – it is responsible for accepting the input, converting it into commands, and sending them to the model and view
Here are some of the top functionalities offered by AngularJS:
- It simplifies the development and testing of single-page applications by providing a framework for client-side MVC. It implements MVC by doing everything after the user has split his application into MVC components.
- To define the application’s user interface, AngularJS uses HTML. Using HTML for the execution of the application simplifies development and developers don’t need to spend time on how the program flows. AngularJS takes care of the dependencies.
- For the purpose of testing, AngularJS allows developers to divide their application into logical modules that have dependencies on each other. They can bring in only the modules they are interested in and take a tactical approach to tests.
- AngularJS has great MVC data binding which results in faster application development and those applications can run on every considerable program and advanced cells, including Android and iOS smartphones.
AngularJS vs. Angular 2 and Above
Angular 2 was completely different from AngularJS. While AngularJS was based on JavaScript, Angular 2 was based on TypeScript. Considered as a superset of JavaScript, TypeScript allowed static typing during the development process. It wasn’t a plain update from the previous version, but Angular 2 had entirely different architecture and approach to data binding.
Including static typing helped in overcoming multiple runtime pitfalls that made AngularJS difficult for usage in complex applications. Now, Angular 2 supports its own command-line interface (CLI) while AngularJS doesn’t have it. The CLI allowed for generating different versions of the same project for different platforms with linting, dynamic type checking, and more.
Talking about performance, Angular 2 and above versions are considerably faster than AngularJS. Though 2-way binding was a great feature in AngularJS that reduced developer effort and time, it created more processing on the client-side and ultimately increased the page load time. Angular 2 took care of this drawback by featuring a flux architecture where detection of change takes place through unidirectional data flow that makes application performance faster.
Finally, the most important factor to consider is AngularJS was not built keeping mobile in mind. Angular 2 and above versions feature mobile support. As the focus has shifted more towards mobile application development at the present time, developers are willing to opt for the latest version of Angular that keeps on updating new features as requirement changes.
Time to Learn Angular
JavaScript is still one of the most popular programming languages and the two most popular JavaScript frameworks are React and Angular. Though React is gaining popularity, Angular is maintaining its enterprise lead.
SDTimes has highlighted the Cloud Academy’s Angular vs React Industry Trends, 2019 which states that Angular is a required skill in 59 percent of the full-stack developer job posts, and larger companies are still recruiting for Angular. So, why not take up Angular training and become capable of applying for full stack developer job opportunities.