A Google Angular developer quoted saying, “These changes should reduce the size of the generated code for your components by more than half in some cases."
It’s good news for the developer’s community!
The amazing makeover of Angular 4 is packed with breaking changes, which has brought major improvements in the framework. Excited to know what’s new in Angular latest version?
Take a quick glance at how Angular 4 will make the development a piece of cake:
Enjoy unparalleled speed with the new View engine
The view layer is generated by Angular from templates and component elements. During this, the AOT compiler produces executable code that contains HTML fragments with event handling, data binding, change detection and dynamic component handling, which makes the app faster. But, this code-gen step generates a lot of code, which has to be downloaded that in turn slow down the application launch.
In Angular 4, AOT compiled templates are made smaller with code size reduced by 60%. It minimizes the loading speed and thereby increases the application performance.
Changes in animation packaging
In the previous version, when animations are required to be added to the application, then it’s necessary to provide the functions for animations as a part of the @Angular/core module. It means this part of the code will also need to be included in the app that creates the bundles of large sizes.
The latest version has pulled out the animation from the @Angular/core module and put into their own package, which eliminates the need to create the production bundles. It also enables the developers to easily find the documentation, and add animations at their own using module Browser Animations Module from @Angular/platform-browser/animations.
Improvements in ngIf and ngFor
The little changes are made to the template binding syntax to make the conditioning and multiple item creations better.
In the Angular 2, there was just an if statement with *nglf, so when the desired condition is not met, the child elements won’t get added to the DOM tree. To add opposing case, another *nglf needs to be added that increase the number of lines of code, which impacts the readability of the code and making changes to the code becomes a Herculean task.
Now, in Angular 4, the else is added to the *nglf directive syntax so that when the condition is not fulfilled, then another stipulated case would happen. This way number of lines of code gets reduced to half and implementing the changes becomes easier.
With Ng For, dynamically, multiple elements from a template can be created by forming a loop over an array of items. For the complex conditions, multiple Ng For can be nested.
Now, source maps available for templates
The source maps are the best solution to debug and catch the errors whenever a bug occurs in the application. The newly launched template compiler has created the source maps for templates as well that helps in identifying the errors from source code to the final development.
With source maps, the developers will have better bug catching experience when they need to step throughcode in the browser.
Alleviated the need to mark the forms with novalidate
The “novalidate” disable the browser’s native validation and consequently, the form data will be marked as invalid upon submission and the Angular application will get complete control over the form validation.That’s why developers often assign “novalidate” to the forms so the value in the form won’t set unless it passes the validation.
In Angular 4, all the forms are automatically set as no validate. Therefore, no time and efforts will get wasted in assigning novalidate to the forms.
Better type checking with TypeScript 2.1
With Angular 4, the typescript is also upgraded to TypeScript 2.1 which checks the silly errors like- passing the wrong types or use of incorrect object during development and run time and prevent the developers from making them.
Thanks to Angular 4 for making an update to Type Script that has enhanced static type checking and improved the ngc compiler speed in the Angular application.
Upgraded Angular universal
Angular universal which allows Angular applications to run on the server is upgraded the first time with Angular 4 version. In the first release, rendering the Angular application outside the browser becomes feasible,which has removed the need to have JavaScript for page content rendering.
Closing thoughts
The development needs are changing constantly and Angular is maintaining a pace by listening to them and with the scheduling of its further releases after every six months. Angular 4 is the product of such planned releases wherein measurable changes are made by the elimination of deprecated features and the addition of new features alongside bug fixing.
The latest version has added the value to the app development with less coding, declarative user interface, automated testing and improved type checking. Now, Angular has turned into a mature and professional framework, which has made the development simpler, speedier and smoother.
The wave of innovation in Angular 4 has made the pool of Angular with mobile app development experts in Prismetrics to try their hands on the framework and built the applications that thrive the users. Stay tuned to us to know the latest patch releases, minor releases and major releases by Google Angular.