A beginner’s guide for Angular – Why Angular? Understanding major benefits
A beginner’s guide for Angular
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are striving for a super-effective online presence these days. Therefore, the
need for a robust web development framework with cutting-edge features is at an
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crucial for any business. For consumers, the existence of a website of a given
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shows that creating web applications is only seemingly an easy task. The
creators of the web app very often focus only on the visual side but forget
about the users' expectations. Meanwhile, a good product should combine UX/UI
design and performance because only such a combination guarantees recognition
in the eyes of consumers. Knowledge about product design is necessary for any
software development project! Another important factor is choosing the proper
tech stack that will be selected appropriately for your project. As a web
application development company, we believe that combining technology and
passion can have a remarkable effect. So if you want a lightweight and fast web
application, learn more about Angular - one of the best frameworks for building
web applications. One of the prime players in this field is ‘Angular’. Angular
is a highly popular web development framework that offers rich user
experiences, fast responsiveness, and code maintainability. It is the fourth
most used front-end web framework according to the Stack Overflow Survey 2021.
This tool
was created back in 2009 by Google to assist web development. It is one of the
most sought-after JavaScript frameworks and is aimed to make front-end
development much simpler and accessible. In this blog post, we’ll discuss the
fundamentals of Angular and why it is better than other frameworks for your
development projects.
So
without any further ado, let’s understand Angular better.
What
is Angular?
Angular
is an open framework and platform for creating Single Page Applications,
written in TypeScript and supported and developed by Google. Angular was
initially supposed to be version 2 of the popular AngularJS framework. Still,
design decisions made Google decide to release it as a separate entity,
including the lack of backward compatibility and the simple update path of
applications written in AngularJS to Angular 2. Angular is released under the
MIT license. Angular has apparent advantages as a framework while also
providing a standard structure for developers to work with. It enables users to
create large applications in a maintainable manner. Angular helps build
interactive and dynamic single page applications (SPAs) through its compelling
features that include templating, two-way binding, modularization, RESTful API
handling, dependency injection, and AJAX handling. Designers can use HTML as a
template language and even extend HTML syntax to easily convey the components
of the application. You also don’t need to rely on third-party libraries to
build dynamic applications with Angular.
Journey
of Angular
The
Angular journey started in 2010 when AngularJS was introduced, and the
framework has now evolved to Angular 12 with many enhancements over the years.
AngularJS is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks. Miško Hevery and
Adam Abrons developed it as part of a Google project in 2009. In 2010 AngularJS
was introduced as an open-source framework. It's been a huge success. Users
have downloaded the app and begun developing unique applications for it. The
Ionic Framework, developed on top of Apache Cordova from Ionic (formerly
DriftyCo), really gave developers an incentive to create mobile apps using
AngularJS. Some of the most well-known businesses started to include it in
their toolset for web development: Netflix, NBC, Walmart, and Forbes. The development
landscape changed after a few years, and AngularJS hit a wall. Angular began to
fall behind as discoveries and standards in JavaScript emerged. More
significantly, the core team had hit a wall when expanding Angular's
functionality to meet the growing needs. In May 2016, emerged Typescript was
shown together with Angular 2. This version of Angular was a complete rewrite
of the framework, attempting to address some of the issues with the original.
The development process for Angular 2 was arduous and lengthy, but it paid off.
Angular 2 is now a modern, well-architected framework that addresses many of
the shortcomings of AngularJS. From then on, subsequent versions were to be
released in 6-month cycles.
What
is Angular used for?
JavaScript
is the most frequently used client-side web applications programming language.
It's embedded into HTML documents to enable interactions with online pages in
various ways. It's a simple, easy-to-learn language that's well-suited to
creating modern apps due to its widespread support. Is JavaScript the best
language for building modular, testable, and productive single-page apps?
Perhaps not. We now have a plethora of frameworks and libraries to help us
achieve our goals. Angular, as an example, is a framework that addresses many
if not all of the problems developers encounter when utilizing JavaScript on
its own. Angular developers can create web apps, SPA, and PWA.
Major
benefits of using Angular
Now
that you have a basic understanding of Angular and its features, let’s discuss
why Angular is an excellent choice for your development projects.
Supported
by Google: One of the biggest advantages of Angular is that it is supported by
Google. Google offers its Long-Term Support (LTS) to Angular that sheds light
on Google’s plan to stick with the framework and further scale the Angular
ecosystem. Google apps also use Angular and their team is quite optimistic
about its stability. Other Angular developers also get the golden opportunity
to learn from Google’s certified Angular professionals.
TypeScript:
Angular applications are built using TypeScript language, a superscript for
JavaScript, which ensures higher security as it supports types (primitives and
interfaces). It helps catch and eliminate errors early in the process while
writing the code or performing maintenance tasks. Unlike CoffeeScript or Dart,
TypeScript is not a stand-alone language. With TypeScript, you can easily take
the existing ES5 or ES2015+ JS code and it will compile it down based on what
you are configuring. It fully supports core ES2015 and ES2016/ES2017 features
such as decorators or async/await. You can also directly debug TypeScript code
in the browser or an editor if you have proper map files created during build
time. This language ensures improved navigation, refactoring, and auto
completion services. You can even opt-out of its inbuilt features when needed.
Declarative
UI: Angular uses HTML to define the UI of the application. HTML, as compared to
JavaScript, is a less convoluted language. It is also a declarative and
intuitive language with directives like ng-app, ng-model, ng-repeat, and forms
control. With its help, you don’t need to invest time in program flows and
deciding what loads first. Simply define what you require and Angular will take
care of it.
POJO:
With Angular, you don’t need any additional getter and setter functions. This
is because every object that Angular uses is POJO (Plain Old JavaScript Object)
which enables object manipulation by providing all the conventional JavaScript
functionalities. You can remove or add properties from the objects while also
looping over these objects when required.
PWA
and SPA: Angular Progressive Web Application (PWA) is a cost-friendly solution
that allows websites to act like mobile apps. It reduces dependency on the
network which significantly improves the user experience of the website.
Caching in PWA works efficiently and conserves bandwidth whenever possible.
This minimizes the risks of serving outdated content. Moreover, as it is a
website, it can be optimized for SEO. Angular also facilitates the development
of single page applications (SPA) which provides server side rendering
capabilities that boost SEO rankings. It also helps load the first page quickly
and improve website performance on mobile and low-powered devices.
Simplified
MVC Pattern: Angular framework is embedded with the original MVC
(Model-View-Controller) software architectural setup. However, it is not
according to the established standards. Angular does not ask developers to
split an application into different MVC components and build a code that could
unite them. Rather, it only asks to divide the app and takes care of everything
else. Hence, Angular and MVVM (Model-View-View-Model) design structures are
quite similar. Angular ensures easy development as it eliminates the need for
unnecessary code. It has a simplified MVC architecture, which makes writing
getters and setters needless. Directives can be managed by some other team as
these are not part of the app code. All in all, developers are promised less
coding, along with lighter and faster apps.
Modular
Structure: Angular organizes code into buckets, whether it is components,
directives, pipes, or services. Those who are familiar with Angular refer to
these buckets as modules. Modules make application functionality organization
easy, segregating it into features and reusable chunks. Modules also allow for
lazy loading, which paves the way for application feature loading in the
background or on-demand. Angular makes it an achievable goal to divide the
labor across different team members while ensuring organized code. You can make
the best of modules when you have a proper understanding of these. Developers
can also improve productivity with appropriate modules built.
Code
Consistency and Easy Testing: Every code base requires consistent coding. This
is because inconsistent coding can increase the risks of delayed launches or
elevated costs. On the other hand, consistent coding can make your site easier
to use and enable the use of templates or pre-defined code snippets.
Angular
framework is based on components that begin in the same style. For instance,
each component places the code in a component class or defines a @Component
decorator (metadata). These components are small interface elements independent
of each other and offer you several benefits, including:
·
Reusability: The
component-based structure of Angular makes the components highly reusable
across the app. You can build the UI (User Interface) with moving parts while
also ensuring a smooth development process for developers.
·
Simplified
Unit-Testing: Being independent of each other, the components make unit
testing much easier.
·
Improved
Readability: Consistency in coding makes reading the code a piece of cake
for new developers on an ongoing project. This adds to their productivity and
overall efficiency of the project.
·
Ease
of Maintenance: Decoupled components are replaceable with better
implementations. Simply put, it enables efficient code maintenance and update.
Additionally,
testing is extremely simple in Angular. Angular.js modules have application
parts that are easy to manipulate. With module separation, you can load the
necessary services while effectively performing automatic testing. You also
don’t even need to remember the module loading order if you follow the “one
file-one module” principle.
Features
of Angular
Document
Object Model: The Document Object Model (DOM) views an XML or HTML document as
a tree, with each node representing a portion of the text. The DOM in Angular
is similar to that in other frameworks. Consider a scenario in which ten
changes are made to the same HTML page. Instead of updating only those that
have already been updated, as would be done with conventional DOM, Angular will
update the entire tree structure of HTML tags.
TypeScript:
TypeScript provides a set of types to JavaScript that may help people write code
that is easier to understand. TypeScript code compiles and runs on all
platforms without issue. Developing an Angular application does not require
users to use TypeScript. However, it is strongly suggested that it improves
syntactic structure while making the codebase more simple to understand and
work with. It's recommended to code Angular apps in TypeScript.
Data
Binding: Data binding is a method of interacting with web page components using
a browser. It uses dynamic HTML and does not require sophisticated scripting or
programming. Data binding is employed in web pages with interactive features,
such as calculators, tutorials, forums, and games. When a website has a lot of
data, it enables better incremental viewing by displaying only part of the content.
Two-way binding is a feature of Angular. The model's state is updated when
changes are made in the corresponding UI components. In contrast, the UI state
reflects any modifications to the model data. This capability allows the
controller to connect the DOM to the model data via the framework.
Testing:
Angular uses the Jasmine testing framework. The Jasmine architecture provides
various features for creating different sorts of test cases. Karma, the test
task-runner, utilizes a configuration file to define the start-up conditions,
reporters, and testing framework.
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