This blog covers the following topics:
Fundamentals of Angular and Its Latest Features
In this tutorial, we will be discussing Angular fundamentals. This part of the tutorial highlights the following content:
- Angular Fundamentals
- Observables
- HttpClient
- Routing and Navigation
- Animations
- Upgrading from AngularJS
- What’s new in Angular?
Watch this video on ‘What is Angular 8?’ from Intellipaat:
Angular Fundamentals
Some of the Angular fundamentals are:
Observables
Observables in Angular applications offer support for transferring messages between publishers and subscribers. Observables provide benefits especially when it comes to event handing and asynchronous programming in Angular applications. We can create an observable instance as a publisher and that instance defines a subscriber method. This subscriber method defines how to obtain or generate the messages that are to be published.
HttpClient
HttpClient is a library in Angular that helps in handling HTTP requests. Angular 6 uses the updated version of HttpClient that resides in the below package:
@angular/common/http
The old version of HttpClient is still available in the package named:
@angular/http
However, Angular team has decided to remove it from the next versions to make the migration of the already existing Angular 4+ applications easier.
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Routing and Navigation
In Angular, router helps in navigating from one view to another accordingly as the user performs tasks such as clicking on a button, selecting from a dropbox, etc. Using router, we can pass optional parameters to the view component which in turn will help the component decide what content to present.
Angular router can interpret an instruction out of a browser URL to navigate to any view.
It also logs all activities in the browser history so the backward and forward navigations through the back and forward buttons work as well.
Animations
We can use animations in our Angular applications to make them more appealing and fun to use. We use animations to improve the user experience.
There won’t be any technical issue coming up if we don’t use animations, but our application won’t hold the same appeal as it would with animations. Not just that but the web page transitions may seem abrupt without animations. Animations enhance the user experience and help in grasping user attention and focusing it to where it is needed.
Take the first step towards becoming an Angular developer with our comprehensive Angular Tutorial!
Upgrading angular js to angular
Upgrading from an immediate older version to a new version is not a big headache, but going from Angular JS all the way to the latest Angular was as tedious as it could be.
Yes, now Angular team has come up with two new tools to take the burden off our shoulders if we want to upgrade our AngularJS application to the most recent version of Angular.
AngularJS applications still work and will continue to work in the future as well, but it’s still considered the best practice to upgrade the application as soon as the new version is out so as to enjoy the benefits of the new version.
As mentioned above, going from AngularJS to Angular is a little complicated and Google is very well aware of that. It made the migration from AngularJS to Angular as easy as possible by introducing the following two tools:
- ngMigration Assistant: This tool first analyzes AngularJS application and then based on that it recommends a migration path best suited for that application. It even provides stats on the application’s complexity, pattern, size, etc.
- ngMigration Forum: This is a community hub where we can look up and find all necessary information regarding migration, which can make this process smoother. Anyone can contribute to this community, by sharing, discussing, and learning information about migrating from AngularJS to Angular. Not only that we can also come to this forum if we are confused about whether we should upgrade our application or not. We will find answers to such queries here.
Now that we have become acquainted with the installation, architecture, and fundamentals of Angular 6, let’s discuss what features make Angular 6 different from the older versions.
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What’s new in Angular 6?
Angular 6 comes with some exciting new additions and some significant bug fixes. Although the number of additions is not that big, a lot has changed under the hood when it comes to tooling. Let’s now discuss these additions in detail.
Latest Angular 6 Features
Angular 6 is out with new features for helping developers build better mobile, web, and desktop applications. These newly added features have made this JavaScript-framework-based software even faster and better to use. Some of the features include Angular Ivy, improved server worker support, etc. Let us discuss these new additions in detail below.
Angular 6 Features
The new features of Angular 6 are the following:
Angular Elements
The Angular team has made it possible to use Angular components in a non-Angular environment using Angular Elements. This new feature lets us wrap our Angular component as a web component and embed it in a non-Angular environment, such as react app, etc.
Service Worker Support
The new Angular 6 offers support for configuration of navigation URLs in Service Workers. This means that those navigation requests will be redirected for which there is no match found between the Asset or Data group and the specified index file.
Bye, Bye Template Element
Also known as the Goodbye Template Element, the Bye, Bye Template Element has been upgraded in Angular 6. In the initial Angular versions, template was used, but ng-template is used in Angular 6.
Angular Ivy
Angular Ivy is the new rendering engine, introduced in Angular 6, which also acts as a view engine. Angular Ivy takes the components and their templates and compiles them into HTML and JavaScript.
From a development point of view, nothing has changed in Angular 6. We still write the components the same way we used to do in the previous versions, but with this rendering engine, a lot more is happening. Angular Ivy, without changing the way we create components and write templates, provides improvements in bundle size and build time, i.e., the code generating the corresponding HTML and JavaScript is lighter and the process of compiling the code is a lot faster. Ivy, in Angular 6, was still very new and not very stable as it was in an experimental phase, but it has been included in further Angular versions as well.
Angular Ivy uses two concepts, namely locality and tree shaking.
- Locality: Before the concept of locality was used, Angular had to do a static analysis of the entire codebase to generate a json file, namely metadata.json, containing the compile instructions. The static analysis slowed things down. But now, Angular Ivy, using the locality feature, compiles one file at a time and the metadata.json file is no longer needed, i.e., we will have a faster recompile time and changes in one component will be less likely to start recompilation for the whole app.
- Tree Shaking: Tree shaking is not essentially an Angular feature, but it is utilized by Angular for Ivy. Tree shaking removes the dependencies that are not used throughout the given project and thus simplifies the final build. It is basically an optimization step implemented during the build time.
Removing Whitespaces
Angular 6 now comes with a new setting called preserveWhitespaces that can be accessed in the tsconfig.json file. The default compiler in Angular 6 is going to have the said setting activated by default to preserve whitespaces. However, we can switch to this setting by going to the above-mentioned file.
Two New Commands: ng add and ng update
Angular CLI, used in Angular 6, now has two additional commands. To add new libraries to our project and to update the codebase of the project, we can use the ng add command. The ng update command lets us update all the Angular dependencies from package.json.
The below images show samples of ng update and ng add commands respectively.
Service Worker
If we have used service workers to deploy our project for the first time in any of the previous versions of Angular, we must be aware of the fact that as amazing it is to use service worker for network interception, caching, and push notifications, it is also very difficult to remove a service worker from the project.
With Angular 6 this issue is now resolved. A safety-worker.js file has been included in the configuration that lets us deactivate the existing service workers. We can also now redirect navigation requests using the service workers.
Animations
In Angular 6, improvements in animations have been made. The polyfill web-animations-js is no longer needed for animations. The Angular team has updated the implementation of animations in Angular 6 and that can save us some precious bytes.
URL Serialization
URL serialization is not a new feature but a bug fix. Some characters such as parentheses, semicolons, etc., were not serialized in route parameters. Angular 6 fixed this issue by encoding them appropriately in Angular 6.
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RxJS 6
Angular 6 has an updated version of RxJS. RxJS is short for Reactive Extensions for JavaScript. It is a library in Angular that is used for reactive programming. RxJS allows us to work with asynchronous data streams and helps in composing asynchronous and callback-based code in Angular.
Bazel
Google has been using the Bazel compiler in nearly all of its software. Now, this compiler is included in Angular 6. Bazel is a build mechanism that only rebuilds what is necessary to build in a project. Since the source code keeps changing very often, it just does not make any sense to rebuild the entire application after every little change. Therefore, with the help of the Bazel compiler, we will be able to rebuild only the code that has been changed. It saves a lot of time and provides us with fast and incremental builds.
Internationalization (i18n) in Angular
Angular 6 comes with i18n, the new Angular CLI that helps in internalizing the Angular application, i.e., the apps designed in Angular 6 can now be available in different languages. Once we have internationalized our app, it will be able to support multiple languages.
This is all about the fundamentals and features of Angular 6. Now, in this Angular 6 tutorial, we will move ahead with learning about Angular Bootstrap.
Now, we will move forward to discussing some of the fundamental features of Angular and other related topics.
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Fundamental Features of Angular
The fundamentals of Angular are basically its components that are organized into NgModules. This is why Angular is also defined as a set of NgModule components. The Angular architecture is based on the model-view-controller framework. Below-mentioned are some of the fundamental features of Angular that every web developer using Angular must know and understand.
Observables
Observables in Angular applications offer support for transferring messages between publishers and subscribers. Observables provide benefits especially when it comes to event handling and asynchronous programming in Angular applications. We can create an observable instance as a publisher and that instance defines a subscriber method. This subscriber method defines how to obtain or generate the messages that are to be published.
HttpClient
HttpClient is a library in Angular that helps in handling HTTP requests. Angular 6 uses the updated version of HttpClient that resides in the below-mentioned package:
@angular/common/http
The old version of HttpClient is still available in the package named:
@angular/http
However, the Angular team has decided to remove it from the next versions to make the migration of the already existing Angular 4+ applications easier.
Routing and Navigation
In Angular, the router helps in navigating from one view to another accordingly as the user performs tasks such as clicking on a button, selecting from a dropbox, etc. Using a router, we can pass optional parameters to the view component, which, in turn, will help the component decide what content to present.
Angular routers can interpret an instruction out of a browser URL to navigate to any view. They also log all activities in the browser history so the backward and forward navigations through the back and forward buttons work as well.
Animations
We can use animations in our Angular applications to make them more appealing and fun to use. We use animations to improve the user experience.
A lack of animations will not lead to any technical issue, but it will result in our application losing its appeal. Not just that but the web page transitions may also seem abrupt without animations. Animations enhance the user experience and help in grasping user attention and focusing it to where it is needed.
Upgrading Angular JS to Angular
Upgrading from an immediate older version to a new version is not a big headache, but going from AngularJS all the way to the latest Angular was as tedious as it could be.
Now, the Angular team has come up with two new tools to take the burden off our shoulders if we want to upgrade our AngularJS application to the most recent version of Angular.
AngularJS applications still work and will continue to work in the future as well, but it is still considered the best practice to upgrade an application as soon as the new version is out so as to enjoy the benefits of the new version.
As mentioned above, going from AngularJS to Angular is a little complicated and Google is very well aware of that. Google made the migration from AngularJS to Angular as easy as possible by introducing the following two tools:
- ngMigration Assistant: This tool first analyzes an AngularJS application and then, based on that, recommends a migration path that is best suited for the application. It even provides stats on the application’s complexity, pattern, size, etc.
- ngMigration Forum: This tool is a community hub where we can look up and find all necessary information regarding migration, which can make this process smoother. Anyone can contribute to this community by sharing, discussing, and learning information about migrating from AngularJS to Angular. Not only that, we can also come to this forum if we are confused about whether we should upgrade our application or not. We will find answers to such queries here.
Now that we have become acquainted with the installation, architecture, and fundamentals of Angular 6, let’s discuss what features make Angular 6 different from the older versions.
Conclusion
Angular has evolved over years with changes in every version of the framework. The addition of the above-mentioned new features in Angular 6 will only make Angular a better tool for web development. In this blog, we have also covered the fundamentals of Angular that will help Angular aspirants in their learning and career. Having knowledge of these new features will also help developers better utilize Angular 6. The framework is going to get better with every edition of new additional features, and we hope that this blog will add value to your learning.
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