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Among the variety of frameworks and libraries, Angular is one of the most popular frameworks in the web development community these days. This happened for a number of reasons that we will touch upon further in this article.
Angular is the biggest open-source framework that suits perfectly for complex web development projects with large infrastructure. Introduced in 2010, Angular was initially designed to create single-page applications. Built-in JavaScript, the platform has undergone massive improvements since then to compete with other big market players like React and Vue.
The most significant improvements demonstrated faster compilation, code size reduction, more efficient error fixing and backward compatibility with previous Angular versions. This made Angular so popular with frontend developers.
Since the initial release, Angular has undergone several versions. Started as AngularJS, nowadays this framework is collectively referred to as Angular.
Let us look at the best features Angular offers to frontend developers.
Detailed documentation. Detailed documentation allows developers quickly find solutions to arising issues without seeking help from their peers.
Component-based architecture. Component-based architecture means that an app consists of independent components that developers can replace, decouple and reuse if need be. This allows better performance, easier adjustments and testing of the final product.
Third-party components support. One of the reasons why Angular become so popular with developers is the variety of tools and components coming from the third party that can be used in Angular applications. These tools add functionality and work towards better performance of the platform.
Google support. Since Angular is the product of Google with their long-term support commitment, the number of Angular followers increased greatly making the framework a highly reliable technical solution.
AOT compiler. Ahead of time compiler allows converting TypeScript and HTML into JavaScript. The code is compiled before your web app is loaded making it time efficient and safe.
CLI. Command-line interface stays in charge of the web development automation, which makes app initialisation, configuration, and development a much easier process. Creating a project, adding features, running units and testing have become a matter of few clear commands. Better quality code and overall development facilitation gained extra points from the developers.
Compatible elements. Angular (starting Angular 6 and versions above) has made their elements compatible with applications built on other platforms like Vue, React, JQuery etc. This adds flexibility to Angular on top of other advantages it offers.
Ivy Renderer. This new feature (in Angular 6 and versions above) allows converting app components into JavaScript code that can be displayed by a browser. Its tree shaking technique during the rendering clears and reduces the unused code resulting in faster app load time.
Material Design. Angular optimised Material Design components to integrate UI elements effortlessly.
Dependency injection. Dependency injection is a design pattern, which defines how changing one components affects the others. While replacing some components without the need to reconfigure all of them benefits the code readability, this may be a rather time consuming process.
Angular Universal. Angular Universal in other words server-side rendering is a tool that enables pre-render your application while users hit your website for the first time. This tool helps to promote your web app in the search engines, speeds up the load time thus increasing the performance.
Angular offers great features and is a strong framework to work with, however, like any other technology, it has its disadvantages too. When choosing the right framework, you need to consider both strong and weak points to see if what the framework offers meets the requirements of your project in particular.
Angular has the following disadvantages:
High entry level. Angular is a complex framework and requires knowledge of JavaScript and TypeScript. While the dependency injection benefits the code readability, it may still be hard for newbie developers to set and manage dependencies between the components.
Poor search engine optimisation. As a JavaScript platform, Angular’s single-page applications often change content making search option difficult to use. The solution to this came through Angular Universal and Prerender.io.
Poor backward compatibility. Migrating through versions is a challenge, often only possible in subsequent order, from one version to another. The older versions though are more flexible in this respect (Angular 4 to Angular 5).
So, what projects can benefit from Angular’s technical solution?
1) Dynamic apps. Since Angular was initially designed to create single-page applications, it has great variety of tools to offer in this respect. It works perfectly for apps/websites that require frequent change of content caused by the user activity. When one component changes, the other depending component will change automatically by virtue of dependency injection feature.
2) Large companies web apps. Angular uses TypeScript, which is an excellent language for complex, large scale projects. TypeScript allows auto completion, strong typing, advanced refactoring and navigation. It has massive infrastructure and strong architecture that enables reusing and maintaining code.
3) Progressive web apps. Progressive web applications, developed by Google, allow delivering improved user experiences and launch apps faster. These applications are delivered through the web, using common web technologies. Currently Angular works hard on improvements towards creating PWAs. Angular 5 and 6 already have a built-in PWA support.
Angular may not be the best solution for small websites with static content, SEO-optimised websites, small short-term projects or start-ups and applications with microservice architecture.
Angular is a great choice for companies with large teams working on complex projects. It is equally an excellent framework for experienced individual developers as the framework has a detailed documentation to work on a self-direct basis.
Here at Magnise we are proud to have experienced developers working with Angular. If you are in doubt and still hesitate whether this is the right platform for your project, get hold of us and we will be delighted to guide you through.
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