Last week, Google released the newest version of their Angular framework, Angular 4.0. The biggest changes seem to be around creating smaller builds and faster code. Our Solutions Group has several Angular 2 applications in production that we have already upgraded to Angular 4, and I am happy to report that the upgrade was smooth in each case.
If you are wondering if upgrading to Angular 4 is a good idea, I have put together a list of potential questions to help you decide.
Last Friday (3/24) the Angular CLI was released as version 1.0. Our team has been using the CLI for production Angular applications since last August. As the numerous beta and RC versions were released we would update our applications accordingly. There were a few bumps along the way when a new release introduced a breaking change, but for the most part the upgrade path was pretty smooth.
I actually wrote about the Angular CLI a few months ago when it was still in beta. Now that the CLI has reached 1.0 status, I thought it would be a good time to review how we are using the CLI, and what we see as the main benefits.
Writing tests has been something I’ve been a proponent of for many years. My testing experience started with C# and then continued on the front end with javascript and Angular 1. So when I started learning Angular 2, I naturally wanted to see what the testing story was.
The front-end testing I’ve done in the past has always had some friction with respect to getting the tools setup properly. Mostly I have used Jasmine as the testing framework, which is pretty self contained – but to get a node test server setup properly there are a variety of other npm modules and karma configuration settings to deal with. I previously wrote about how the angular-cli makes it easy to get an Angular 2 project setup, and this includes getting the test tools setup as well. So instead of dealing with configuration settings, you can quickly get to just writing tests.
One of the good things about Angular 1 was that it was easy to add the AngularJS library to your application and start using it without a lot of setup ceremony. Add a <script> tag to pull in angular.js, stick an ng-app attribute on the body or html tag, and you were ready to go. Of course, in a more complex application you would end up using additional libraries and probably setup a build process, but the barrier to getting started was low.
With Angular 2, getting started from scratch is not nearly as simple. While there are multiple “starter-packs” that have been created to help with generating a ready-to-go project, the thing that has most caught my attention is the Angular CLI (command-line-interface). Although the Angular CLI has not been officially released (it is in beta as of this writing), it already has a number of features that not only get you up and running quickly, they also help with adding other pieces of your application as it is developed.
