With the introduction of Angular 14, the fun of developing your web app has just reached the next level.
What Is Angular?
Angular is an open-source web application framework developed by Google and currently licensed by MIT. It provides a framework for building scalable web applications and integrated libraries with many features for developers, with an ever-growing suite of developer tools.
From components to a wide variety of templates to Angular CLI (Command Line Interface) to first-party libraries loaded with features, you can easily build your next project and scale it to an enterprise-level application using Angular.
The Original Angular and Its Growth
The original Angular platform (AngularJS) was developed to extend the HTML vocabulary for app development. Components like directives, reusable components, localization, and built-in testability greatly impacted HTML development, thus creating a readable and faster environment for development.
AngularJS evolved into Angular 13 with the growth in web development and the need for a faster environment to compile and develop more complex applications, and the need for web developers with ever-increasing libraries and directories.
Version 14 and Its Updates
The recently released version 14 is the next significant after Angular 13. Developers of the platform appear to have listened to user needs regarding complexity in operation in the GitHub community regarding the latest version. Nevertheless, the team behind the platform strived to simplify the user experience.
Typed form and standalone components are two significant new features in Angular 14.
Standalone components are yet to hit the stable version API (Application Programming Interface) but are available in developer preview and will potentially change outside the typical model of backward compatibility. The parent company Google says, “Angular Standalone Components aims to streamline the authoring of Angular applications by reducing the need for modules.” Examples include standalone components, directives, and pipes, where the standalone: true flag allows you to include imports directly within @Component() without calling @NgModule(). This reduces the code time and size of the program.
The company plans to roll out standalone components as a stable API in the coming months after all the designs are implemented and no glitches are observed in the developer preview.
Typed form saves the values inside form controls, groups, and arrays default across the API. This allows for safer forms during deeply nested complex operations. By applying updated schematics, users can enable types at their own pace due to incremental migration to typed forms.
Other than this, the API updates have some new minor features and an upgraded API for various older features:
- Streamline Best practices
With Angular 14, a built-in feature enables developers to build better apps from the regular code editor.
- Streamlined Title Accessibility
Title property. App’s page titles uniquely communicate pages. Previously, the process of adding title accessibility was streamlined with the route. Now, with Angular 14, the developer need not add additional imports to add the title to the page.
- Error Recognition
The error of squared brackets inside round brackets ([]) instead of the other way round [()], which is the correct way, is now recognized by the CLI.
- Faster Shipping Code
Angular 14 uses the latest TypeScript 4.7 release and targets ES2020 by default. This allows CLI to ship more minor codes without downgrading the level.
- Built-in Primitives and Tooling
In addition to CDK (Component Dev Kit) and tooling improvements, CDK menu primitives and CLI auto-completion provide the building blocks of a more robust development environment.
- Angular DevTools id Available Offline and in Firefox.
With Angular 14, the DevTools debugging extension introduces support for offline use. At the same time, Firefox users can find the extension in the add-ons for Mozilla.
- ESM-Enabled Application Experiment
With version 14, Angular introduces an experimental build-based build system for ng build, which compiles pure ESM output.
What Are You Most Excited for?
Angular 14 is yet to introduce some features in stable built, which would be added in minor updates. These include:
- Implement APIs for Optional NgModules
This tweak will introduce APIs that allow developers to initialize applications, instantiate components, and use the router without NgModules. As the next step, Angular will improve use cases such as TestBed, Angular elements, etc.
- Enhanced Image Processing
Aurora and Angular teams have collaborated to implement an image directive that aims to improve Core Web Vitals. This can open gates for various new tasks developers were unable to create. This is in the prototype phase currently.
- Modern CSS
This update focuses on modernizing Angular to current web development standards. In this project, Angular would introduce guidelines on using modern CSS features to ensure developers follow the latest practices for layout, styling, etc.
- Better Stack Traces
The Angular and Chrome DevTools are working together to enable more readable stack traces for error messages.
- New CDK Primitives
This update works on new CDK primitives to support the creation of custom components based on the WAI-ARIA design patterns for Listbox and Combobox. Angular 14 introduces a stable menu and dialog primitives to become future gateways for this project.
- Improved Angular Material Components by Integrating MDC Web
MDC Web is a library created by the Google Material Design team that provides reusable primitives for building Material Design components. The Angular team is incorporating these primitives into Angular Material. MDC Web aligns the Angular Material more closely with the Material Design specification, expands accessibility, and improves the component quality of the projects.
- Documentation Refactoring
Ensure all existing documentation fits into a consistent set of content types. Update excessive use of tutorial-style documentation into independent topics. In a previous version, Angular refactored the template content. This update works on introducing a better structure for components and dependency injection.
Conclusion
Angular 14 introduces various minor teaks alongside the Typed form and standalone components. The team has worked on making the user experience better and smooth, making Angular more beginner friendly, and raising the resource quality for the developers to make more complex applications solve more intricate problems. Looking forward, Angular seems to create complex libraries, directories, and devKits for the developer as the growth of demand for web applications continues to rise.
Also Read: What Is An Angular Developer And Why Do You Need One?
