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Angular 4.0.0 Now Available

329 points by theodorejb 10y ago

elmigranto 10y ago
I'm so out of the loop… Feels like a week ago everyone talked about how cool and performant v2 will be when it's finally out of the beta and officially ready for production, and now there is v4 release. What's going on with versions?
- ErikAugust 10y ago
  SEMVER - Semantic Versioning - http://semver.org/ http://semver.org/
  - manquer 10y ago
    Not exactly semver either, Angular 4 is backward compatible with 2.x.x. Following semver would mean it should continue to be in 2 series
    - WorldMaker 10y ago
      It makes breaking changes that might break some users. That is following semver. Semver doesn't follow backward compatibility in the major number, it follows potential breaking changes that will impact downstream consumers.
  - usrusr 10y ago
    Aka when in doubt, increment leftmost, also we won't tell you wether we did a complete conceptual overhaul or just found a corner case that is provably incompatible. And I really thought it would be good.
- bsimpson 10y ago
  semver
- dreamache 10y ago
  All of the Angular modules were 2.x.x with exception to the router, which was version 3.x.x. So to keep all of them at the same major version, they pushed everything to version 4. Also, the jump from AngularJS (1) to Angular 2 was drastically different. Going from 2 to 4 however is much less significant in terms of breaking changes. You won't have to relearn hardly anything if you already know 2.
- Eric_WVGG 10y ago
  "Angular 1" is now known as Angular.js and is effectively at the end of its line. Angular 2+ is now simply Angular. All new releases follow a naming of version X.Y.Z where X indicates breaking changes, Y non-breaking new features, and Z is bug fixes. Version 3 is being skipped over due to poor naming of the related Angular Router lib. http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/12/ok-let-me-explain-its-going-to-be.html http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/12/ok-let-me-explain-its-...
  - wernercd 10y ago
    Damn... I was really hoping for Angular 16 next year...
    - chiefalchemist 10y ago
      16 will be skipped for...no reason what so ever.
    - rimliu 10y ago
      They should just name with a year. So in 2018 you'd know that Angular 2017 is so last year…
  - skybrian 10y ago
    There is also AngularDart, which has forked and isn't following the same numbering scheme: https://webdev.dartlang.org/angular https://webdev.dartlang.org/angular
  - cheapsteak 10y ago
    It seems that lockstep versioning makes semantic versioning less meaningful A major version bump for a module could signal a breaking change, or it could just be due to the packages it's locked to having had a breaking change
    - humanrebar 10y ago
      A breaking change in your dependencies is a breaking change for you. If it weren't, minor version upgrades would cause you to pull in incompatible dependencies. This is why keeping your dependency list as tiny as possible is imperative.
- louhike 10y ago
  It is explained in the first sentence of the article.
dreamache 10y ago
Just a quick note to those who would like to play around with it.. Install the latest version of the CLI: npm install -g @angular/cli And then run: ng new project-name --ng4 The "--ng4" flag is currently required, as it doesn't yet install ng4 by default.
- robwormald 10y ago
  New release of CLI is running final checks in CI. Should release momentarily! Edit: it's released! npm install @angular/cli
booh 10y ago
Is it relevant anymore ? Most of the javascript developers I know are working with Ember.
- marcrosoft 10y ago
  Ember? I thought that died after react came out.
  - quink 10y ago
    react? I thought that died after Vue.js came out.
    - bitmapbrother 10y ago
      Vue.js? I thought that died when Angular 4 came out.
      - brianwawok 10y ago
        Angular 4? I thought that died when Scala.js came out
        nimchimpsky 10y ago
        Scala.js ? I thought that died when inferno came out ?
        tribby 10y ago
        inferno? I thought that died when riot came out.
        lukaszkups 10y ago
        riot? I thought that died when Rakun.js came out.
robwormald 10y ago
Angular core team here, we're pretty excited about this release. Main change, as noted, is the new View Engine. The design doc[0] is worth a read if you're interested in front-end at all. Happy to answer any questions! [0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/195L4WaDSoI_kkW094LlShH6gT3B7K1GZpSBnnLkQR-g/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/d/195L4WaDSoI_kkW094LlShH6g...
- adam77 10y ago
  is it really smaller and faster. i got the impression the payload size reduction might come at a cost to render performance?
  - robwormald 10y ago
    That's discussed in the doc (and there's some metrics). Update speed takes a (minimal) performance hit, in exchange for code size reductions. We (and our colleagues at Google working on the web in general) find that the largest impact on performance comes from simply shipping less code. Edit: correction: turns out our tests show we didn't take a perf hit on updates at all, and in fact ever-so-slightly improved. So win win :D
- d2kx 10y ago
  1) I'm still new to this, but why would someone not use Angular Universal/why is it not default? I have only read positives, but am sure there must be a reason. 2) Why do we need Angular Material 2, when Google's official Material Components Web project is meant to be used with all kinds of frameworks and even has framework integration examples with Angular2: https://github.com/material-components/material-components-web https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w... 3) Should I follow Quickstart or CLI Quickstart in the docs to get started? I have heard that the CLI is recommended nowadays, but the Angular 4.0 release blog says the CLI isn't even stable.
  - robwormald 10y ago
    1) the core of Angular Universal "graduated" into @angular/platform-server with 4.0 - previously it was a more experimental project. We're officially supporting a "renderToString()" API that can be used however you like. So really, it's brand new, and we're excited to see what the community does with it. Philosophically, pre-rendering every SPA server side isn't a silver bullet. For a ton of cases it makes a lot of sense, but we want to avoid the impression that we're positioning SSR as a replacement for making your app fast. 2) The expectation of the Material Components Web project is that everything be "wrapped" for the specific framework. Angular Material is native Angular, and we have a team dedicated to that. Polymer has a material suite as well, and most of those components can work in Angular apps too. Components for everyone! 2a) you're asking a Googler that question. We have like, 11 messaging apps. I don't know what to tell you. 3) CLI went stable today, with its 1.0 release. We'll be moving the docs over to use the CLI everywhere soon - personally, i'd use the CLI to generate a new project and then follow along the tutorials.
coding123 10y ago
I suspect there's going to be a bit of pushback to this acceleration in numbering.
- robwormald 10y ago
  Major release every 6 months, 2 major version deprecation policy. There was definitely some initial pushback, but we hope to demonstrate with this release that it's a) not that scary and b) good for both developers and users. Most devs should see significant reduction (upwards of 50%) in their output builds. We think that's a reasonable trade off for a couple hours of work to upgrade. In this release, most developers should be able to simply update their dependencies and rebuild. We're aiming for regular, planned, minimal changes, rather than Big Bang style change from AngularJS -> Angular.
  - coding123 10y ago
    I think you're right. Probably something similar to how they changed Java from the 1.x to the 5, 6, 7... series. It did take a couple years for people to stop saying 1.5 though, as I suspect will be the case for people saying "Angular2" trying to find a way to distance themselves from Angular 1 but not really caring if some component was written for 4, 5, etc..
    - robwormald 10y ago
      you'll find that generally, we refer to it as "Angular" or "Angular 4.0" - officially, AngularJS is 1.x. We'll see how it shakes out, but so far our community has been pretty awesome about it.
- natoliniak 10y ago
  If my experience is any indication of general industry practices, businesses are very risk averse when it comes to upgrading libraries or dependencies as it usually triggers costly regression testing. At my current gig, we still run on angular 1.3.something and there is no way the business will allow us to migrate to v2 as we struggle to justify exactly what added value will we get from essentially a top-down rewrite.
aprdm 10y ago
Even with SemVer versions it looks really weird to see a new Angular relase branded as 4.0.0. Angular 1 to Angular 2 made me drop angular entirely, that happened less than 6 months ago I believe. Just reading Angular 4 gives me the creeps. Is 4 widely different from 2? How am I suppose to know if you using semver and already have a really bad history?
- robwormald 10y ago
  Most developers should be able to simply update their dependencies and rebuild. A few APIs have been deprecated, but they continue to exist and can be removed at a developer's leisure, per our versioning policy [0] http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/10/versioning-and-releasing-angular.html?m=1 http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/10/versioning-and-releasi...
  - moloch 10y ago
    Lol, if only the real world were that simple. I have an Angular 2.4 project that when updated to 4.0.0 produces about 300+ build time errors (guess you can't access `private` members from templates anymore, it'll be fuuuuuun updating every component and template to work with "backwards" compatible v4), but basically every other version of Angular breaks your code so you just sorta have to live with it.
    - Nitramp 10y ago
      That didn't change between Angular 2 and Angular 4 - but maybe you changed your build process and are now running AoT with error checking? That would explain why your templates are now error checked and were not before.
      - moloch 10y ago
        Is that enabled by default in 4? I use and identical AOT build process with 2.4 and 4 (ng-cli) and there's no problems building with 2.4
- 10y ago
git-pull 10y ago
I'll probably try it. But man, am I getting jaded about all this javascript framework stuff. Every 6 months stuff breaks, every 2 years there's a huge shift. The problem with javascript I've been facing is value. Time and effort doesn't always correlate to what I get in the other end. In fact, I can say when building, going single-page is a time sink. And it's almost always a mistake to go SPA first. Using a django or a rails lets you get the basics and data flow nailed down early on. Get into a framework too early and have a need to change something? Have fun explaining to your manager/client how costly it is to do a "simple" modification to a JS app when you have to throw the state you built it upon out the door. What I want is a system tightly coupled into a server-side framework like a Django or a Rails that degrades gracefully and I only have to program the interactivity one time. Something that'd plop right into the asset pipeline/django compressor so I don't have to go outside of the framework to build. Hundreds of hours of my life have been spent chasing this dream of sharing server side code with client side JS frameworks. That's what I need. Meteor didn't do it for me. As for rendr, I've done stuff better with backbone/express in-house. As of 2017, I get my best bang for the buck using django and pjax. No joking, I went from full DRF + Backbone Marionette -> to plain old jquery and pjax and couldn't be happier. All these new build tools (grunt, gulp, webpack... come on), ES versions (I was ok with ES5). None of these things are helping me ship stuff ahead of / on time and correctly. They're creating an even larger gap between the server side data, logic and templates and the JS interactivity. If anyone is listening, I'd love to have a well-supported opinionated distribution of django or rails that just renders forms, tables, etc. with angular/react/etc. and degrades gracefully.
- coding123 10y ago
  I'm actually really excited about Angular "2+" for something you've expressed here. I know that a React developer won't see this the same way, but I really feel like it's come down (for me at least) to either Angular "2+" or React - and whatever the reason someone is going to be on one side of the fence or the other. I've written smallish to largish programs in Vue, React, Ember, Polymer - and in all of those cases tried, wherever possible to do so in RXJS and Typescript. When everything else shakes out, I'm finding that nothing is coming close to the RXJS and Typescript combination "sweet spot". There have been various attempts to make a lot of the other frameworks "typescript friendly" but it's just nowhere near. So why is Rx and Typescript so important to me? Well specifically those two are kind of like the drug that once you try them, you literally can't go back. I've been wanting this level of type checking for 10 years on the front end. I am not willing to lose it now. As for Rx, it's the one true way to do async flows. Promises and Callbacks just end up creating large pyramidic code.
georgefrick 10y ago
Community here has been pretty negative on this lately. So I'll just add I've been using Angular 2x and also Ionic 2 the last year or so with great success. One real benefit we saw was the ability to take a lot of Backbone code and just quickly port it (models to services, templates just back to html for a component, etc). This is helping us help our enterprise clients in conversions of both older front end code and older Java EE code (for example JSP + Struts => Restful + NG2X).
- robwormald 10y ago
  This is good to know, cheers!
crudbug 10y ago
Congratulations to the team. I have been using Angular 2 for our internal operations dashboard. I am seeing : platform-browser / platform-server namespace. Can we expect platform-android, platform-ios, platform-jvm ? Looking at the angular compiler pipeline, with AST this should be possible ?
- robwormald 10y ago
  The first two are pretty well covered by our friends at Ionic and NativeScript. The last one, well, that's a bit more complicated. Let's just say that sort of thing is on the radar.
tribby 10y ago
increasingly, angular seems less like a tool I'd use and more like a platform that exists to sell typescript and generally influence the web. in 2017 I'm curious why I'd pick angular over vue for a web-based project, if anyone has insight. not over "x js framework" -- over vue specifically. vue 2 is pretty much exactly what I wanted angular 2 to be.
Nican 10y ago
Does anyone have an good example app using modern Angular? Looks like cool features, but I have a hard time envisioning on how they all work together.
- dreamache 10y ago
  Check out angularexpo.com and madewithangular.com
  - SFJulie 10y ago
    Well, less than half of the site on madewithangular actually have any "ng-app" or angular strings in their web page when they are not in 404. I was suprised, so I made random check, and it was true as far as I can tell. Plus for fun I randomly checked, also among the remaining sites: very few are «angular powered» on the whole domain. Making the claim these people use angular even less solid. Please feel free to contribute to my script checking your claims if you feel I missed some true positive https://gist.github.com/jul/7056d4535da42103407ba2424e47d507 https://gist.github.com/jul/7056d4535da42103407ba2424e47d507 after all no detection tools can claim to be 100% accurate.
Touche 10y ago
Is Angular ever going to support web standards such as web components?
- robwormald 10y ago
  You can already use most simple web components in Angular without issues - as far as Angular is concerned, it's just another DOM element. We also support native (or emulated) Shadow DOM out of the box. It gets a little more interesting when you start interleaving Angular and WebComponents, but one of the deprecations in 4.0 (regarding Angular's use of the <template> tag) is squarely aimed at making that easier in the future.
  - Touche 10y ago
    Thanks, what I was asking is when are Angular components going to be Web components?
    - robwormald 10y ago
      It's unlikely we'll ever have developers write Custom Elements directly - that said, the View Engine rewrite we just did gives us the ability to (theoretically) have our compiler output Custom Elements. We're investigating some use cases on this.
regeiger101 10y ago
Will I be able to build on this platform with pure JavaScript (rather than TypeScript)? What kept me from Angular 2 adoption was its emphasis on TS.
- hccampos 10y ago
  If you don't like TS stay away from Angular. In fact, just stay away from Angular, even if you like TS. You will save yourself a lot of headaches...but hey with Angular you might be able to hire some cheap/junior programmers who are familiar with OOP or move some backend guys who like C#/Java to do frontend.
SFJulie 10y ago
As I said in another comment the fun part is less than 50% example on madewithangular actually use angular on advertised pages, and even the true positive on one page do not imply a significative part of the web domain is powered by angular. Check by yourself. (Condition for tagging a page made with angular is no 40X/50X/60X and m/(angular|ng-app)/ in html feel free to correct me if I was wrong, I will make my mea culpa and published revised figures. Domain checking was random, by hand (I never trust my software)) https://gist.github.com/jul/7056d4535da42103407ba2424e47d507 https://gist.github.com/jul/7056d4535da42103407ba2424e47d507 So making the hypothesis of good faith from the submitter it means 50% of historic users of angular dropped it since 2015. Most of them anyway did not «fully» adopted it. If a technology is being dropped after 2 years by their early motivated adopters, maybe there is a smell?
otto_ortega 10y ago
VueJS is the only of these JavaScript UI Libraries/Frameworks I can stand... The only one whose syntax doesn't make my eyes bleed!... I can't wait for Alibaba's Weex to be officially released so Vue can be used for developing mobile apps too. Reusing components across platforms and the web is the only reason why I would like to jump into the JS wagon!
- camus2 10y ago
  > VueJS is the only of these JavaScript UI Libraries/Frameworks I can stand... Agreed. I just can't stand Angular's bloat, especially its IoC container. If I want to use one, then let me choose the one I want. A UI framework shouldn't come with it's own container it makes no sense. If this UI framework is too complicated to boostrap manually then it's too complicated at first place. To make things clear I actually liked Angular 1 since it allows people to easily upgrade from jQuery and raw DOM.
  - dpacmittal 10y ago
    >A UI framework shouldn't come with it's own container it makes no sense. If this UI framework is too complicated to boostrap manually then it's too complicated at first place. I don't think Angular is just a UI framework though.
- onion2k 10y ago
  The only one whose syntax doesn't make my eyes bleed. To me that sounds like choosing a tool based on the experience it gives the developer rather than the experience it gives the user. That's entirely the wrong way to pick what to build an app with. User experience is far more important. (That's not a comment about Angular or Vue. They're both great, and you should use whichever is best for the web app you're writing.)
  - jbergens 10y ago
    I assume you can create almost any ui with any framework. Some combinations will be a bit easier. I agree that "beautiful" is not a very precise or important metric but easy to read and update is important. That said I think React is really good.
tomelders 10y ago
I'll be that guy. I'm sure the Angular team are great people, and they're clearly talented devs... but stay away from Angular. It doesn't help with the problems you will actually face. Typed Javascript is a cargo cult. Angular just plain confusing for no apparent benefit. Dependency injection is bizarre. The distinction between modules, components, and directive is unnecessary. The Javascript community in general is moving away from OOP towards functional programming, but Angular has hitched it's wagon to OOP. It's reliance on the decorator pattern is maddening. It's view layer performance is sub standard. It's opinionated in all the wrong ways. And I say this as someone with a lot of experience with Angular 1, Angular 2. Trust me, go for libraries over frameworks every time. Redux, React, Immutable, Sagas, and reSelect. That's the future of web app development.
- hesarenu 10y ago
  As a longtime redux user i am all into Mobx now. It is simpler then redux.
  - hccampos 10y ago
    For most apps, yes I think MobX is easier. However, both of them, combined with React/Preact are hugely superior to Angular.
  - uitgewis 10y ago
    Just mentioning, there is ngrx^1 which is the redux pattern for Angular 2 apps. It also integrates with Observables. [1]: https://github.com/ngrx/store https://github.com/ngrx/store
    - hccampos 10y ago
      Problem is you get a cumbersome templating language, extremely verbose component declarations, even more verbose dynamic components and a bunch of other horrible stuff. In React it is a breeze to make Higher Order Components to connect to a store and it also makes it much easier to separate those smart components from small reusable presentation components. I have seen people shy away from making smaller components just because Angular makes it so damned painful to make components. It is just easier to stuff everything in a template and copy paste everything around, which leads to a serious case of spaghetti code. I am happy for you if you don't have to work with something like that. I do, and I can tell you it is not nice in any way.
Bahamut 10y ago
I have been leading a good sized Angular app for work for the past 8 months, and upgrading from v2 to v4 has been painless, even while having an AOT compilation build pipeline set up - the only modifications we had to do was switch OpaqueToken to InjectorToken, <template> to <ng-template>, and Renderer usage to Renderer2, and these weren't required to be done yet. We only did those changes to get ahead of the curve from the deprecation messages. On first note, the codegen size decreased dramatically for AOT compiled builds - we went from ~600 KB vendor + app minified and gzipped (not counting 50 KB of polyfills) to ~400 KB. This is huge, and the boot speed feels even faster on first user load of the page! Thanks to the Angular team for this fantastic work!
- EugeneOZ 10y ago
  absolutely same experience in our case. Painless update with few template to ng-template ctrl+f changes. Angular CLI stabilization is a much more important news, actually. One of mistakes of Angular team - Angular CLI had to be ready before Angular itself.
  - bflesch 10y ago
    Not an angular programmer, but I felt the API docs page didn't load quickly enough.
- doczoidberg 10y ago
  I also had a painless upgrade from 2.4 to 4.0. With angular-cli ng2 is now usable and in my opinion the best Javacript/typescript framework.
- Bahamut 10y ago
  I forgot to mention one other change we had to do - we had to switch to the new @angular/animations package, but that was also a pretty simple switch.
awqrre 10y ago
Angular feels like it's there only to obfuscate the web's source code... (don't be shy if you think I need downvotes...)
- hccampos 10y ago
  Well, the more people are aware of how bad Angular are, hopefully the less momentum it will get and the less jobs using it there will be.
drawkbox 10y ago
The monolithic javascript framework era is over and has been. Anyone choosing monolithic over microframeworks/libraries will regret it over time, that time may be as quick as 6 months, right around launch and switching to maintenance. Pour some out for the poor bastards that have to support legacy versions of these frameworks.
wiradikusuma 10y ago
Can anyone from Angular team please make integration with Google Cloud Endpoints, or at least show how it's done? the official documentation is for AngularJS 1.x: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/angularjs-cloud-endpoints-recipe-for-building-modern-web-applications https://cloud.google.com/solutions/angularjs-cloud-endpoints...
- cobookman 10y ago
  Hi wiradiksuma. Ive filed a request internally to update the docs. Feel free to email me at bookman@google.com to get status updates.
sova 10y ago
Man y'all niggas is trippin. Angular changed completely with angular 2.0. If you say 2 and 1 are the same you are plain lyin' to yourself. I am not kidding. They are not the same thing, and should not be named the same. Likewise, pretending that 1+2 = 4 is just fool's talk. I don't care anymore for angular; Having your app-state in-sync with your code is great, but changing your whole paradigm every 6 months because the powers-that-be told you that your major version number _should_ increment for no apparent reason? You must be out of you got-damn mind. So fuck angular, and fuck all that bullshit that comes with it. Downvote me all you want, you guys gotta get a grip on reality, or let go completely, because this honey-do-good-half-assed-bs is getting you absolutely nowhere.
- sova 10y ago
  Honestly, I don't care. Angular 2 was shit, and Angular 4 will certainly be even more shit. Google, get your shit together.
- kevindqc 10y ago
  Angular 1 was released 6 years ago. Was 'every 6 months' a typo?
kabes 10y ago
Just reading about 'renderModuleFactory' in this announcement makes it sound enough like Java EE bullshit that I want to stay far away from it.
- camus2 10y ago
  > Just reading about 'renderModuleFactory' in this announcement makes it sound enough like Java EE bullshit that I want to stay far away from it. it is old school JEE, which is ironic as JEE,Spring and all that bullshit are trying to move far away from what they used to be. All that complexity has a cost.
ianamartin 10y ago
Honest question, How does Angular make my life easier or better in some way? I currently use Python and Pyramid as a framework. Mako templates. And SQLAlchemy for database interactions. How is any of this really better?
- fuzzy2 10y ago
  Angular is different. It is not concerned with the server side at all. It's just about so-called Single Page Applications. This SPA would typically talk to services via "AJAX" (though probably with JSON). These services could be implemented using any technology.
  - rocky1138 10y ago
    This still doesn't describe how Angular is objectively "better." In fact, because it requires Javascript just to render HTML, it is objectively worse than straight up HTML delivered from a server-side solution.
    - fuzzy2 10y ago
      > This still doesn't describe how Angular is objectively "better." Of course. Because it isn’t. It’s not worse either. It’s different. It’s a completely different approach to creating web applications. Everyone has different criteria to meet. Working without JavaScript usually isn’t one with modern web applications.
      - ianamartin 10y ago
        To be clear, I don't eschew JavaScript. Of course you need that for applications. JS stuff goes into a Mako template where I import and call the JS when I need it. This has the added benefit of extremely small page sizes. Nothing gets loaded globally. Every page has only and exactly what it needs to function properly. I'm just wondering if I am that much of a dinosaur and I need to invest the time into learning some of these frameworks to be competitive on the market in the future. What I do works well. It's fast, it's scalable, and I'm very fast at developing with that toolchain. The code is clean, clear, well-organized, and modular. Anyone who knows Python, SQL(Alchemy), and JavaScript can pick it up and work with it. I can work on any different part of an application without worrying about if it might break something elsewhere. I feel like the patterns I've gotten comfortable with are kind of a sweet spot between micro-services and monolithic. My apps are technically monoliths, but the various modules are clearly isolated. I'm in my late 30s now, and I want to keep up and not turn into one of those old guys who refuses to stay current. I'm genuinely curious what the value proposition is, outside of learning a new paradigm for its own sake. There's always value in learning new ways to solve problems you already have a good handle on. But outside of those things, is there some secret magic I'm missing out on?
tannhaeuser 10y ago
First of all, congrats to the Angular team. I'll say personally I've never been a fan of Angular, but I think if you want Java/J2EE-ish all-encompassing component model and decorator-/annotation-based GUIs, it certainly is a very strong contender (though kindof the thermonuclear option and absurdly complex IMHO, at least if you have some prior web development experience). I think Google's track record wrt. long-term maintainance isn't half bad really (GWT and closure tools have been around for a long time). That said, I've recently talked to recruiters, and was told Angular has already peaked as the go-to framework for enterprise MVC web apps, and is replaced by React and others (and I'm assuming Angular wasn't all that much used outside that demographic because of the heavy setup and on boarding/buy-in). In the course of JavaScript generational cycles I'm expecting we're bound to re-discover "evergreen" web apps, those being characterized by lack of heavy build pipelines, simple browser-refresh driven development cycles, and straightforward use of web forms (+ maybe components). An open question for me is what about TypeScript, eg. since Angular has been a major driver/user behind its type-heavy approach, will it suffer along with Angular?
- alttab 10y ago
  Rails, bootstrap, react when necessary on portions of pages. Use regular links again - use regular forms again, remember - AJAX can be cool, but it doesn't have to be the whole app. Remember when the server generated HTML? You could middle click a link! I'll even use normal browser history, instead of re-implementing it in Javascript for my app (with bugs).
aedron 10y ago
Angular is so 8 months ago.
jlebrech 10y ago
why does it feel like I have to be a developer OF angular in order to create an app. too many of the design choices they made manifest themselves in MY code, a framework isn't supposed to do this.
- romanovcode 10y ago
  I think opinionated framework should do this. This way there is only one way of doing things - angular way. So when all the angular developers quit and new ones join they can semi-understand the code because it's written in "angular way".
ramigb 10y ago
I really hope the Angular team find their path again, because it seems like they've lost it a long time ago!. I remember learning Angular 1, 5 years ago, it was an awesome experience but now ... let's say I wish them the best for real.
ssijak 10y ago
Hmm. I see that Angular is getting aaaaalot of hate here. I really tried to understand why but have not found really valid reasons, just preferences. I have used Angular 1.x a lot and have just tried Angular 2. It really enables me (somebody who comes from primarily strong backend dev experience) to work on frontend SPA apps productively and fast. It does not 'feel' heavyweight or that it gets in my way too much, but the contrary is true. Of course, it has it`s quirks, as every larger lib have, but it`s pluses outweigh minuses by far for me. Preferences aside, does Angular make you less productive than other options? Do you feel that you fight the framework? Can you finish non trivial frontend apps, involving 5+ team members, 'better', with cleaner code and much faster with other options? This are just honest questions. I wanted to start some pet project in angular2 soon, but would listen to alternatives, maybe it is a right moment to try some of them.
- danielpatrick 10y ago
  I've been using Angular 2 for a medium sized application that will be going into production within the next few weeks. I'm not affiliated with the Angular team at all. I started using it when this app was very much a POC last summer, just as the Angular team was finishing up the 2.0 release. I learned firsthand last summer the issues with using a framework that was still in the oven: constant updates and some dependency changes. That was no fun for some time. But I'll say now that it was worth it. (Maybe I should have started a little later, post-2.0 release). But I'm now building out a decent sized and complex application much faster than I'd ever done before. It is strongly typed, it is modular, and it has dependency injection. Oh and it's strongly typed. I can't emphasize the importance of this enough. I know you can use typescript without Angular, but that the Angular community and the docs are all in typescript make this a typescript-native framework. I'll never look at JavaScript again if I don't have to. You and your IDE and the rest of your team can know an object's Type without having to scrounge around, it's such a blissful departure from JavaScript. It definitely has a learning curve. If you're spinning up a simple web app it may or may not be for you. (...though now I use it to spin up simple web apps because I'm used to it and it's so good for that) But for anything complex that is being worked on across a team, I recommend you take the time to learn it. It's not perfect, nothing is. But it is leagues ahead of any framework I've used on the front end. And having gone to Typescript, I will never use a native JavaScript framework again.
andrewclunn 10y ago
I just want to say thank you for angular 2. I still code in 1 mind you, but now that ecosystem is stable and mature, and I can just get my stuff done while ignoring all the hip trends.
caleblloyd 10y ago
What is one supposed to type into Google when trying to differentiate from Angular 1 and Angular >= 2? I used to type Angular2 but posts going forward may mention Angular4 now and not show up.
- ZoeZoeBee 10y ago
  Angular 2+ is just Angular. Angular 1.x is AngularJs. If you are trying to differentiate the two in google, add -AngularJS to the end of the search. Also pretty good bet you're going to want to search within the last year for up to date posts. Versioning and Releasing Angular http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/12/ok-let-me-explain-its-going-to-be.html http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/12/ok-let-me-explain-its-...
serb348 10y ago
Can't wait for Angular 29!!!!!!!1
voidmain0001 10y ago
I wonder what Rob Eisenberg formerly of Angular and now with Aurelia.io would have to say about v4?
finchisko 10y ago
"These changes reduce the size of the generated code for your components by around 60% in most cases" Sorry angular team, it just mean you did poor job at first.
crudbug 10y ago
I tried react initially. As a Java developer, I needed types, rxjs, modules without the Hassel of webpack configs. Angular provides consistent structure to your app. With angular-cli, consistent interface to front-end development. Having ported it from Ember, IMO the cli interface should be standard across all front-end frameworks. I see it as microkernel like framework for front-end development. In Java land, we have OSGi standard for modular software component development, angular has sort-of similar design. The only confusing part is NgModule, the team should rename angular modules as NgBundle - which consists of native TS modules. I read somewhere, angular team is working on material widget library, please make style-less components with theming support.
adrianlmm 10y ago
Stay away from this abobination, it will make your project unnessary complex, there are better alternatives.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
AngeloAnolin 10y ago
At some point, I will take a look at what Angular 4.0 has to offer. My criteria to adopting a framework: * Makes me more productive * Allow me to ship apps / solutions better and faster * Minimal time doing some head scratching on how to implement stuff * Integration with other frameworks * Uncomplicated setup and build process * Community support (hey, we can't possibly know every inch of a framework unless we are the author)
zygimantasdev 10y ago
Using Angular2 for 10 months now. Can say it has been a pleasure to work with it. Sure there are some problems - but it is open source. Free. Can't be complaining about stuff you get for free ;) One thing - name of the framework should have been something different. At first we thought it is going to be called Angular2 and later it became just Angular. You can imagine that whole community will have to rename their libraries and etc. In overall, big thank you from our frontend team for giving us a great framework
softwarefounder 10y ago
I'm using Knockout JS along with a micro hash-tag routing framework for my SPA. Couldn't be happier. Knockout JS is mature, and doesn't change. Yet there's still PR's that fix things here and there. JS frameworks these days are such job creators. Which is great for consulting, but I don't want such mutability for my own products.
krystiangw 10y ago
Angular seems to have hard time but it is still the most popular Frontend framework: https://jobsquery.it/stats/frontend-frameworks/group https://jobsquery.it/stats/frontend-frameworks/group
- johnkoper 10y ago
  Yep, 3k Angular job openings looks good: https://jobsquery.it/jobs;page=1;tags=AngularJs;sortBy=PUBLISHED_AT_DESC;query=;location= https://jobsquery.it/jobs;page=1;tags=AngularJs;sortBy=PUBLI...
harrisreynolds 10y ago
Two words: Code. Bloat.
vladimir-y 10y ago
Angular is being overengineered, why for example do you need dependency injection having modules system. It's better to go with VueJS, it can do all that is needed being simple, fast, lightweight and VERY developers friendly.

329 points by theodorejb 10y ago

I'm so out of the loop… Feels like a week ago everyone talked about how cool and performant v2 will be when it's finally out of the beta and officially ready for production, and now there is v4 release. What's going on with versions?

ErikAugust 10y ago
SEMVER - Semantic Versioning - http://semver.org/ http://semver.org/
- manquer 10y ago
  Not exactly semver either, Angular 4 is backward compatible with 2.x.x. Following semver would mean it should continue to be in 2 series
  - WorldMaker 10y ago
    It makes breaking changes that might break some users. That is following semver. Semver doesn't follow backward compatibility in the major number, it follows potential breaking changes that will impact downstream consumers.
- usrusr 10y ago
  Aka when in doubt, increment leftmost, also we won't tell you wether we did a complete conceptual overhaul or just found a corner case that is provably incompatible. And I really thought it would be good.
bsimpson 10y ago
semver
dreamache 10y ago
All of the Angular modules were 2.x.x with exception to the router, which was version 3.x.x. So to keep all of them at the same major version, they pushed everything to version 4. Also, the jump from AngularJS (1) to Angular 2 was drastically different. Going from 2 to 4 however is much less significant in terms of breaking changes. You won't have to relearn hardly anything if you already know 2.
Eric_WVGG 10y ago
"Angular 1" is now known as Angular.js and is effectively at the end of its line. Angular 2+ is now simply Angular. All new releases follow a naming of version X.Y.Z where X indicates breaking changes, Y non-breaking new features, and Z is bug fixes. Version 3 is being skipped over due to poor naming of the related Angular Router lib. http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/12/ok-let-me-explain-its-going-to-be.html http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/12/ok-let-me-explain-its-...
- wernercd 10y ago
  Damn... I was really hoping for Angular 16 next year...
  - chiefalchemist 10y ago
    16 will be skipped for...no reason what so ever.
  - rimliu 10y ago
    They should just name with a year. So in 2018 you'd know that Angular 2017 is so last year…
- skybrian 10y ago
  There is also AngularDart, which has forked and isn't following the same numbering scheme: https://webdev.dartlang.org/angular https://webdev.dartlang.org/angular
- cheapsteak 10y ago
  It seems that lockstep versioning makes semantic versioning less meaningful A major version bump for a module could signal a breaking change, or it could just be due to the packages it's locked to having had a breaking change
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    A breaking change in your dependencies is a breaking change for you. If it weren't, minor version upgrades would cause you to pull in incompatible dependencies. This is why keeping your dependency list as tiny as possible is imperative.
louhike 10y ago
It is explained in the first sentence of the article.

dreamache 10y ago

Just a quick note to those who would like to play around with it.. Install the latest version of the CLI: npm install -g @angular/cli And then run: ng new project-name --ng4 The "--ng4" flag is currently required, as it doesn't yet install ng4 by default.

robwormald 10y ago
New release of CLI is running final checks in CI. Should release momentarily! Edit: it's released! npm install @angular/cli

booh 10y ago

Is it relevant anymore ? Most of the javascript developers I know are working with Ember.

marcrosoft 10y ago
Ember? I thought that died after react came out.
- quink 10y ago
  react? I thought that died after Vue.js came out.
  - bitmapbrother 10y ago
    Vue.js? I thought that died when Angular 4 came out.
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      Angular 4? I thought that died when Scala.js came out
      - nimchimpsky 10y ago
        Scala.js ? I thought that died when inferno came out ?
        tribby 10y ago
        inferno? I thought that died when riot came out.
        lukaszkups 10y ago
        riot? I thought that died when Rakun.js came out.

robwormald 10y ago

Angular core team here, we're pretty excited about this release. Main change, as noted, is the new View Engine. The design doc[0] is worth a read if you're interested in front-end at all. Happy to answer any questions! [0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/195L4WaDSoI_kkW094LlShH6gT3B7K1GZpSBnnLkQR-g/mobilebasic https://docs.google.com/document/d/195L4WaDSoI_kkW094LlShH6g...

adam77 10y ago
is it really smaller and faster. i got the impression the payload size reduction might come at a cost to render performance?
- robwormald 10y ago
  That's discussed in the doc (and there's some metrics). Update speed takes a (minimal) performance hit, in exchange for code size reductions. We (and our colleagues at Google working on the web in general) find that the largest impact on performance comes from simply shipping less code. Edit: correction: turns out our tests show we didn't take a perf hit on updates at all, and in fact ever-so-slightly improved. So win win :D
d2kx 10y ago
1) I'm still new to this, but why would someone not use Angular Universal/why is it not default? I have only read positives, but am sure there must be a reason. 2) Why do we need Angular Material 2, when Google's official Material Components Web project is meant to be used with all kinds of frameworks and even has framework integration examples with Angular2: https://github.com/material-components/material-components-web https://github.com/material-components/material-components-w... 3) Should I follow Quickstart or CLI Quickstart in the docs to get started? I have heard that the CLI is recommended nowadays, but the Angular 4.0 release blog says the CLI isn't even stable.
- robwormald 10y ago
  1) the core of Angular Universal "graduated" into @angular/platform-server with 4.0 - previously it was a more experimental project. We're officially supporting a "renderToString()" API that can be used however you like. So really, it's brand new, and we're excited to see what the community does with it. Philosophically, pre-rendering every SPA server side isn't a silver bullet. For a ton of cases it makes a lot of sense, but we want to avoid the impression that we're positioning SSR as a replacement for making your app fast. 2) The expectation of the Material Components Web project is that everything be "wrapped" for the specific framework. Angular Material is native Angular, and we have a team dedicated to that. Polymer has a material suite as well, and most of those components can work in Angular apps too. Components for everyone! 2a) you're asking a Googler that question. We have like, 11 messaging apps. I don't know what to tell you. 3) CLI went stable today, with its 1.0 release. We'll be moving the docs over to use the CLI everywhere soon - personally, i'd use the CLI to generate a new project and then follow along the tutorials.

coding123 10y ago

I suspect there's going to be a bit of pushback to this acceleration in numbering.

robwormald 10y ago
Major release every 6 months, 2 major version deprecation policy. There was definitely some initial pushback, but we hope to demonstrate with this release that it's a) not that scary and b) good for both developers and users. Most devs should see significant reduction (upwards of 50%) in their output builds. We think that's a reasonable trade off for a couple hours of work to upgrade. In this release, most developers should be able to simply update their dependencies and rebuild. We're aiming for regular, planned, minimal changes, rather than Big Bang style change from AngularJS -> Angular.
- coding123 10y ago
  I think you're right. Probably something similar to how they changed Java from the 1.x to the 5, 6, 7... series. It did take a couple years for people to stop saying 1.5 though, as I suspect will be the case for people saying "Angular2" trying to find a way to distance themselves from Angular 1 but not really caring if some component was written for 4, 5, etc..
  - robwormald 10y ago
    you'll find that generally, we refer to it as "Angular" or "Angular 4.0" - officially, AngularJS is 1.x. We'll see how it shakes out, but so far our community has been pretty awesome about it.
natoliniak 10y ago
If my experience is any indication of general industry practices, businesses are very risk averse when it comes to upgrading libraries or dependencies as it usually triggers costly regression testing. At my current gig, we still run on angular 1.3.something and there is no way the business will allow us to migrate to v2 as we struggle to justify exactly what added value will we get from essentially a top-down rewrite.

aprdm 10y ago

Even with SemVer versions it looks really weird to see a new Angular relase branded as 4.0.0. Angular 1 to Angular 2 made me drop angular entirely, that happened less than 6 months ago I believe. Just reading Angular 4 gives me the creeps. Is 4 widely different from 2? How am I suppose to know if you using semver and already have a really bad history?

robwormald 10y ago
Most developers should be able to simply update their dependencies and rebuild. A few APIs have been deprecated, but they continue to exist and can be removed at a developer's leisure, per our versioning policy [0] http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/10/versioning-and-releasing-angular.html?m=1 http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/10/versioning-and-releasi...
- moloch 10y ago
  Lol, if only the real world were that simple. I have an Angular 2.4 project that when updated to 4.0.0 produces about 300+ build time errors (guess you can't access `private` members from templates anymore, it'll be fuuuuuun updating every component and template to work with "backwards" compatible v4), but basically every other version of Angular breaks your code so you just sorta have to live with it.
  - Nitramp 10y ago
    That didn't change between Angular 2 and Angular 4 - but maybe you changed your build process and are now running AoT with error checking? That would explain why your templates are now error checked and were not before.
    - moloch 10y ago
      Is that enabled by default in 4? I use and identical AOT build process with 2.4 and 4 (ng-cli) and there's no problems building with 2.4
10y ago

git-pull 10y ago

I'll probably try it. But man, am I getting jaded about all this javascript framework stuff. Every 6 months stuff breaks, every 2 years there's a huge shift. The problem with javascript I've been facing is value. Time and effort doesn't always correlate to what I get in the other end. In fact, I can say when building, going single-page is a time sink. And it's almost always a mistake to go SPA first. Using a django or a rails lets you get the basics and data flow nailed down early on. Get into a framework too early and have a need to change something? Have fun explaining to your manager/client how costly it is to do a "simple" modification to a JS app when you have to throw the state you built it upon out the door. What I want is a system tightly coupled into a server-side framework like a Django or a Rails that degrades gracefully and I only have to program the interactivity one time. Something that'd plop right into the asset pipeline/django compressor so I don't have to go outside of the framework to build. Hundreds of hours of my life have been spent chasing this dream of sharing server side code with client side JS frameworks. That's what I need. Meteor didn't do it for me. As for rendr, I've done stuff better with backbone/express in-house. As of 2017, I get my best bang for the buck using django and pjax. No joking, I went from full DRF + Backbone Marionette -> to plain old jquery and pjax and couldn't be happier. All these new build tools (grunt, gulp, webpack... come on), ES versions (I was ok with ES5). None of these things are helping me ship stuff ahead of / on time and correctly. They're creating an even larger gap between the server side data, logic and templates and the JS interactivity. If anyone is listening, I'd love to have a well-supported opinionated distribution of django or rails that just renders forms, tables, etc. with angular/react/etc. and degrades gracefully.

coding123 10y ago
I'm actually really excited about Angular "2+" for something you've expressed here. I know that a React developer won't see this the same way, but I really feel like it's come down (for me at least) to either Angular "2+" or React - and whatever the reason someone is going to be on one side of the fence or the other. I've written smallish to largish programs in Vue, React, Ember, Polymer - and in all of those cases tried, wherever possible to do so in RXJS and Typescript. When everything else shakes out, I'm finding that nothing is coming close to the RXJS and Typescript combination "sweet spot". There have been various attempts to make a lot of the other frameworks "typescript friendly" but it's just nowhere near. So why is Rx and Typescript so important to me? Well specifically those two are kind of like the drug that once you try them, you literally can't go back. I've been wanting this level of type checking for 10 years on the front end. I am not willing to lose it now. As for Rx, it's the one true way to do async flows. Promises and Callbacks just end up creating large pyramidic code.

georgefrick 10y ago

Community here has been pretty negative on this lately. So I'll just add I've been using Angular 2x and also Ionic 2 the last year or so with great success. One real benefit we saw was the ability to take a lot of Backbone code and just quickly port it (models to services, templates just back to html for a component, etc). This is helping us help our enterprise clients in conversions of both older front end code and older Java EE code (for example JSP + Struts => Restful + NG2X).

robwormald 10y ago
This is good to know, cheers!

crudbug 10y ago

Congratulations to the team. I have been using Angular 2 for our internal operations dashboard. I am seeing : platform-browser / platform-server namespace. Can we expect platform-android, platform-ios, platform-jvm ? Looking at the angular compiler pipeline, with AST this should be possible ?

robwormald 10y ago
The first two are pretty well covered by our friends at Ionic and NativeScript. The last one, well, that's a bit more complicated. Let's just say that sort of thing is on the radar.

tribby 10y ago

increasingly, angular seems less like a tool I'd use and more like a platform that exists to sell typescript and generally influence the web. in 2017 I'm curious why I'd pick angular over vue for a web-based project, if anyone has insight. not over "x js framework" -- over vue specifically. vue 2 is pretty much exactly what I wanted angular 2 to be.

Nican 10y ago

Does anyone have an good example app using modern Angular? Looks like cool features, but I have a hard time envisioning on how they all work together.

dreamache 10y ago
Check out angularexpo.com and madewithangular.com
- SFJulie 10y ago
  Well, less than half of the site on madewithangular actually have any "ng-app" or angular strings in their web page when they are not in 404. I was suprised, so I made random check, and it was true as far as I can tell. Plus for fun I randomly checked, also among the remaining sites: very few are «angular powered» on the whole domain. Making the claim these people use angular even less solid. Please feel free to contribute to my script checking your claims if you feel I missed some true positive https://gist.github.com/jul/7056d4535da42103407ba2424e47d507 https://gist.github.com/jul/7056d4535da42103407ba2424e47d507 after all no detection tools can claim to be 100% accurate.

Touche 10y ago

Is Angular ever going to support web standards such as web components?

robwormald 10y ago
You can already use most simple web components in Angular without issues - as far as Angular is concerned, it's just another DOM element. We also support native (or emulated) Shadow DOM out of the box. It gets a little more interesting when you start interleaving Angular and WebComponents, but one of the deprecations in 4.0 (regarding Angular's use of the <template> tag) is squarely aimed at making that easier in the future.
- Touche 10y ago
  Thanks, what I was asking is when are Angular components going to be Web components?
  - robwormald 10y ago
    It's unlikely we'll ever have developers write Custom Elements directly - that said, the View Engine rewrite we just did gives us the ability to (theoretically) have our compiler output Custom Elements. We're investigating some use cases on this.

regeiger101 10y ago

Will I be able to build on this platform with pure JavaScript (rather than TypeScript)? What kept me from Angular 2 adoption was its emphasis on TS.

hccampos 10y ago
If you don't like TS stay away from Angular. In fact, just stay away from Angular, even if you like TS. You will save yourself a lot of headaches...but hey with Angular you might be able to hire some cheap/junior programmers who are familiar with OOP or move some backend guys who like C#/Java to do frontend.

SFJulie 10y ago

As I said in another comment the fun part is less than 50% example on madewithangular actually use angular on advertised pages, and even the true positive on one page do not imply a significative part of the web domain is powered by angular. Check by yourself. (Condition for tagging a page made with angular is no 40X/50X/60X and m/(angular|ng-app)/ in html feel free to correct me if I was wrong, I will make my mea culpa and published revised figures. Domain checking was random, by hand (I never trust my software)) https://gist.github.com/jul/7056d4535da42103407ba2424e47d507 https://gist.github.com/jul/7056d4535da42103407ba2424e47d507 So making the hypothesis of good faith from the submitter it means 50% of historic users of angular dropped it since 2015. Most of them anyway did not «fully» adopted it. If a technology is being dropped after 2 years by their early motivated adopters, maybe there is a smell?

otto_ortega 10y ago

VueJS is the only of these JavaScript UI Libraries/Frameworks I can stand... The only one whose syntax doesn't make my eyes bleed!... I can't wait for Alibaba's Weex to be officially released so Vue can be used for developing mobile apps too. Reusing components across platforms and the web is the only reason why I would like to jump into the JS wagon!

camus2 10y ago
> VueJS is the only of these JavaScript UI Libraries/Frameworks I can stand... Agreed. I just can't stand Angular's bloat, especially its IoC container. If I want to use one, then let me choose the one I want. A UI framework shouldn't come with it's own container it makes no sense. If this UI framework is too complicated to boostrap manually then it's too complicated at first place. To make things clear I actually liked Angular 1 since it allows people to easily upgrade from jQuery and raw DOM.
- dpacmittal 10y ago
  >A UI framework shouldn't come with it's own container it makes no sense. If this UI framework is too complicated to boostrap manually then it's too complicated at first place. I don't think Angular is just a UI framework though.
onion2k 10y ago
The only one whose syntax doesn't make my eyes bleed. To me that sounds like choosing a tool based on the experience it gives the developer rather than the experience it gives the user. That's entirely the wrong way to pick what to build an app with. User experience is far more important. (That's not a comment about Angular or Vue. They're both great, and you should use whichever is best for the web app you're writing.)
- jbergens 10y ago
  I assume you can create almost any ui with any framework. Some combinations will be a bit easier. I agree that "beautiful" is not a very precise or important metric but easy to read and update is important. That said I think React is really good.

tomelders 10y ago

I'll be that guy. I'm sure the Angular team are great people, and they're clearly talented devs... but stay away from Angular. It doesn't help with the problems you will actually face. Typed Javascript is a cargo cult. Angular just plain confusing for no apparent benefit. Dependency injection is bizarre. The distinction between modules, components, and directive is unnecessary. The Javascript community in general is moving away from OOP towards functional programming, but Angular has hitched it's wagon to OOP. It's reliance on the decorator pattern is maddening. It's view layer performance is sub standard. It's opinionated in all the wrong ways. And I say this as someone with a lot of experience with Angular 1, Angular 2. Trust me, go for libraries over frameworks every time. Redux, React, Immutable, Sagas, and reSelect. That's the future of web app development.

hesarenu 10y ago
As a longtime redux user i am all into Mobx now. It is simpler then redux.
- hccampos 10y ago
  For most apps, yes I think MobX is easier. However, both of them, combined with React/Preact are hugely superior to Angular.
- uitgewis 10y ago
  Just mentioning, there is ngrx^1 which is the redux pattern for Angular 2 apps. It also integrates with Observables. [1]: https://github.com/ngrx/store https://github.com/ngrx/store
  - hccampos 10y ago
    Problem is you get a cumbersome templating language, extremely verbose component declarations, even more verbose dynamic components and a bunch of other horrible stuff. In React it is a breeze to make Higher Order Components to connect to a store and it also makes it much easier to separate those smart components from small reusable presentation components. I have seen people shy away from making smaller components just because Angular makes it so damned painful to make components. It is just easier to stuff everything in a template and copy paste everything around, which leads to a serious case of spaghetti code. I am happy for you if you don't have to work with something like that. I do, and I can tell you it is not nice in any way.

Bahamut 10y ago

I have been leading a good sized Angular app for work for the past 8 months, and upgrading from v2 to v4 has been painless, even while having an AOT compilation build pipeline set up - the only modifications we had to do was switch OpaqueToken to InjectorToken, <template> to <ng-template>, and Renderer usage to Renderer2, and these weren't required to be done yet. We only did those changes to get ahead of the curve from the deprecation messages. On first note, the codegen size decreased dramatically for AOT compiled builds - we went from ~600 KB vendor + app minified and gzipped (not counting 50 KB of polyfills) to ~400 KB. This is huge, and the boot speed feels even faster on first user load of the page! Thanks to the Angular team for this fantastic work!

EugeneOZ 10y ago
absolutely same experience in our case. Painless update with few template to ng-template ctrl+f changes. Angular CLI stabilization is a much more important news, actually. One of mistakes of Angular team - Angular CLI had to be ready before Angular itself.
- bflesch 10y ago
  Not an angular programmer, but I felt the API docs page didn't load quickly enough.
doczoidberg 10y ago
I also had a painless upgrade from 2.4 to 4.0. With angular-cli ng2 is now usable and in my opinion the best Javacript/typescript framework.
Bahamut 10y ago
I forgot to mention one other change we had to do - we had to switch to the new @angular/animations package, but that was also a pretty simple switch.

awqrre 10y ago

Angular feels like it's there only to obfuscate the web's source code... (don't be shy if you think I need downvotes...)

hccampos 10y ago
Well, the more people are aware of how bad Angular are, hopefully the less momentum it will get and the less jobs using it there will be.

drawkbox 10y ago

The monolithic javascript framework era is over and has been. Anyone choosing monolithic over microframeworks/libraries will regret it over time, that time may be as quick as 6 months, right around launch and switching to maintenance. Pour some out for the poor bastards that have to support legacy versions of these frameworks.

wiradikusuma 10y ago

Can anyone from Angular team please make integration with Google Cloud Endpoints, or at least show how it's done? the official documentation is for AngularJS 1.x: https://cloud.google.com/solutions/angularjs-cloud-endpoints-recipe-for-building-modern-web-applications https://cloud.google.com/solutions/angularjs-cloud-endpoints...

cobookman 10y ago
Hi wiradiksuma. Ive filed a request internally to update the docs. Feel free to email me at bookman@google.com to get status updates.

sova 10y ago

Man y'all niggas is trippin. Angular changed completely with angular 2.0. If you say 2 and 1 are the same you are plain lyin' to yourself. I am not kidding. They are not the same thing, and should not be named the same. Likewise, pretending that 1+2 = 4 is just fool's talk. I don't care anymore for angular; Having your app-state in-sync with your code is great, but changing your whole paradigm every 6 months because the powers-that-be told you that your major version number _should_ increment for no apparent reason? You must be out of you got-damn mind. So fuck angular, and fuck all that bullshit that comes with it. Downvote me all you want, you guys gotta get a grip on reality, or let go completely, because this honey-do-good-half-assed-bs is getting you absolutely nowhere.

sova 10y ago
Honestly, I don't care. Angular 2 was shit, and Angular 4 will certainly be even more shit. Google, get your shit together.
kevindqc 10y ago
Angular 1 was released 6 years ago. Was 'every 6 months' a typo?

kabes 10y ago

Just reading about 'renderModuleFactory' in this announcement makes it sound enough like Java EE bullshit that I want to stay far away from it.

camus2 10y ago
> Just reading about 'renderModuleFactory' in this announcement makes it sound enough like Java EE bullshit that I want to stay far away from it. it is old school JEE, which is ironic as JEE,Spring and all that bullshit are trying to move far away from what they used to be. All that complexity has a cost.

ianamartin 10y ago

Honest question, How does Angular make my life easier or better in some way? I currently use Python and Pyramid as a framework. Mako templates. And SQLAlchemy for database interactions. How is any of this really better?

fuzzy2 10y ago
Angular is different. It is not concerned with the server side at all. It's just about so-called Single Page Applications. This SPA would typically talk to services via "AJAX" (though probably with JSON). These services could be implemented using any technology.
- rocky1138 10y ago
  This still doesn't describe how Angular is objectively "better." In fact, because it requires Javascript just to render HTML, it is objectively worse than straight up HTML delivered from a server-side solution.
  - fuzzy2 10y ago
    > This still doesn't describe how Angular is objectively "better." Of course. Because it isn’t. It’s not worse either. It’s different. It’s a completely different approach to creating web applications. Everyone has different criteria to meet. Working without JavaScript usually isn’t one with modern web applications.
    - ianamartin 10y ago
      To be clear, I don't eschew JavaScript. Of course you need that for applications. JS stuff goes into a Mako template where I import and call the JS when I need it. This has the added benefit of extremely small page sizes. Nothing gets loaded globally. Every page has only and exactly what it needs to function properly. I'm just wondering if I am that much of a dinosaur and I need to invest the time into learning some of these frameworks to be competitive on the market in the future. What I do works well. It's fast, it's scalable, and I'm very fast at developing with that toolchain. The code is clean, clear, well-organized, and modular. Anyone who knows Python, SQL(Alchemy), and JavaScript can pick it up and work with it. I can work on any different part of an application without worrying about if it might break something elsewhere. I feel like the patterns I've gotten comfortable with are kind of a sweet spot between micro-services and monolithic. My apps are technically monoliths, but the various modules are clearly isolated. I'm in my late 30s now, and I want to keep up and not turn into one of those old guys who refuses to stay current. I'm genuinely curious what the value proposition is, outside of learning a new paradigm for its own sake. There's always value in learning new ways to solve problems you already have a good handle on. But outside of those things, is there some secret magic I'm missing out on?

tannhaeuser 10y ago

First of all, congrats to the Angular team. I'll say personally I've never been a fan of Angular, but I think if you want Java/J2EE-ish all-encompassing component model and decorator-/annotation-based GUIs, it certainly is a very strong contender (though kindof the thermonuclear option and absurdly complex IMHO, at least if you have some prior web development experience). I think Google's track record wrt. long-term maintainance isn't half bad really (GWT and closure tools have been around for a long time). That said, I've recently talked to recruiters, and was told Angular has already peaked as the go-to framework for enterprise MVC web apps, and is replaced by React and others (and I'm assuming Angular wasn't all that much used outside that demographic because of the heavy setup and on boarding/buy-in). In the course of JavaScript generational cycles I'm expecting we're bound to re-discover "evergreen" web apps, those being characterized by lack of heavy build pipelines, simple browser-refresh driven development cycles, and straightforward use of web forms (+ maybe components). An open question for me is what about TypeScript, eg. since Angular has been a major driver/user behind its type-heavy approach, will it suffer along with Angular?

alttab 10y ago
Rails, bootstrap, react when necessary on portions of pages. Use regular links again - use regular forms again, remember - AJAX can be cool, but it doesn't have to be the whole app. Remember when the server generated HTML? You could middle click a link! I'll even use normal browser history, instead of re-implementing it in Javascript for my app (with bugs).

aedron 10y ago

Angular is so 8 months ago.

jlebrech 10y ago

why does it feel like I have to be a developer OF angular in order to create an app. too many of the design choices they made manifest themselves in MY code, a framework isn't supposed to do this.

romanovcode 10y ago
I think opinionated framework should do this. This way there is only one way of doing things - angular way. So when all the angular developers quit and new ones join they can semi-understand the code because it's written in "angular way".

ramigb 10y ago

I really hope the Angular team find their path again, because it seems like they've lost it a long time ago!. I remember learning Angular 1, 5 years ago, it was an awesome experience but now ... let's say I wish them the best for real.

ssijak 10y ago

Hmm. I see that Angular is getting aaaaalot of hate here. I really tried to understand why but have not found really valid reasons, just preferences. I have used Angular 1.x a lot and have just tried Angular 2. It really enables me (somebody who comes from primarily strong backend dev experience) to work on frontend SPA apps productively and fast. It does not 'feel' heavyweight or that it gets in my way too much, but the contrary is true. Of course, it has it`s quirks, as every larger lib have, but it`s pluses outweigh minuses by far for me. Preferences aside, does Angular make you less productive than other options? Do you feel that you fight the framework? Can you finish non trivial frontend apps, involving 5+ team members, 'better', with cleaner code and much faster with other options? This are just honest questions. I wanted to start some pet project in angular2 soon, but would listen to alternatives, maybe it is a right moment to try some of them.

danielpatrick 10y ago
I've been using Angular 2 for a medium sized application that will be going into production within the next few weeks. I'm not affiliated with the Angular team at all. I started using it when this app was very much a POC last summer, just as the Angular team was finishing up the 2.0 release. I learned firsthand last summer the issues with using a framework that was still in the oven: constant updates and some dependency changes. That was no fun for some time. But I'll say now that it was worth it. (Maybe I should have started a little later, post-2.0 release). But I'm now building out a decent sized and complex application much faster than I'd ever done before. It is strongly typed, it is modular, and it has dependency injection. Oh and it's strongly typed. I can't emphasize the importance of this enough. I know you can use typescript without Angular, but that the Angular community and the docs are all in typescript make this a typescript-native framework. I'll never look at JavaScript again if I don't have to. You and your IDE and the rest of your team can know an object's Type without having to scrounge around, it's such a blissful departure from JavaScript. It definitely has a learning curve. If you're spinning up a simple web app it may or may not be for you. (...though now I use it to spin up simple web apps because I'm used to it and it's so good for that) But for anything complex that is being worked on across a team, I recommend you take the time to learn it. It's not perfect, nothing is. But it is leagues ahead of any framework I've used on the front end. And having gone to Typescript, I will never use a native JavaScript framework again.

andrewclunn 10y ago

I just want to say thank you for angular 2. I still code in 1 mind you, but now that ecosystem is stable and mature, and I can just get my stuff done while ignoring all the hip trends.

caleblloyd 10y ago

What is one supposed to type into Google when trying to differentiate from Angular 1 and Angular >= 2? I used to type Angular2 but posts going forward may mention Angular4 now and not show up.

ZoeZoeBee 10y ago
Angular 2+ is just Angular. Angular 1.x is AngularJs. If you are trying to differentiate the two in google, add -AngularJS to the end of the search. Also pretty good bet you're going to want to search within the last year for up to date posts. Versioning and Releasing Angular http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/12/ok-let-me-explain-its-going-to-be.html http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/12/ok-let-me-explain-its-...

serb348 10y ago

Can't wait for Angular 29!!!!!!!1

voidmain0001 10y ago

I wonder what Rob Eisenberg formerly of Angular and now with Aurelia.io would have to say about v4?

finchisko 10y ago

"These changes reduce the size of the generated code for your components by around 60% in most cases" Sorry angular team, it just mean you did poor job at first.

crudbug 10y ago

I tried react initially. As a Java developer, I needed types, rxjs, modules without the Hassel of webpack configs. Angular provides consistent structure to your app. With angular-cli, consistent interface to front-end development. Having ported it from Ember, IMO the cli interface should be standard across all front-end frameworks. I see it as microkernel like framework for front-end development. In Java land, we have OSGi standard for modular software component development, angular has sort-of similar design. The only confusing part is NgModule, the team should rename angular modules as NgBundle - which consists of native TS modules. I read somewhere, angular team is working on material widget library, please make style-less components with theming support.

adrianlmm 10y ago

Stay away from this abobination, it will make your project unnessary complex, there are better alternatives.

deleted 10y ago

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AngeloAnolin 10y ago

At some point, I will take a look at what Angular 4.0 has to offer. My criteria to adopting a framework: * Makes me more productive * Allow me to ship apps / solutions better and faster * Minimal time doing some head scratching on how to implement stuff * Integration with other frameworks * Uncomplicated setup and build process * Community support (hey, we can't possibly know every inch of a framework unless we are the author)

zygimantasdev 10y ago

Using Angular2 for 10 months now. Can say it has been a pleasure to work with it. Sure there are some problems - but it is open source. Free. Can't be complaining about stuff you get for free ;) One thing - name of the framework should have been something different. At first we thought it is going to be called Angular2 and later it became just Angular. You can imagine that whole community will have to rename their libraries and etc. In overall, big thank you from our frontend team for giving us a great framework

softwarefounder 10y ago

I'm using Knockout JS along with a micro hash-tag routing framework for my SPA. Couldn't be happier. Knockout JS is mature, and doesn't change. Yet there's still PR's that fix things here and there. JS frameworks these days are such job creators. Which is great for consulting, but I don't want such mutability for my own products.

krystiangw 10y ago

Angular seems to have hard time but it is still the most popular Frontend framework: https://jobsquery.it/stats/frontend-frameworks/group https://jobsquery.it/stats/frontend-frameworks/group

johnkoper 10y ago
Yep, 3k Angular job openings looks good: https://jobsquery.it/jobs;page=1;tags=AngularJs;sortBy=PUBLISHED_AT_DESC;query=;location= https://jobsquery.it/jobs;page=1;tags=AngularJs;sortBy=PUBLI...

harrisreynolds 10y ago

Two words: Code. Bloat.

vladimir-y 10y ago

Angular is being overengineered, why for example do you need dependency injection having modules system. It's better to go with VueJS, it can do all that is needed being simple, fast, lightweight and VERY developers friendly.