The production release of the newest JavaScript framework happened today. Angular 2 is out of Beta! The official launch is fantastic news for anyone who needs to build complex business applications.
Today, modern companies rely on web-based software to operate efficiently and provide value to their customers. These applications often contain custom and intricate business logic that gives businesses an edge over their competition. The new version of Angular provides a solid foundation to rapidly and efficiently build and scale advanced cross-platform applications. Angular 2 allows companies to transform to a client-side software development model and pivot in an agile manner while still maintaining strict IT controls on core backend services that drive the business logic behind the scenes.
In the past ten years, there has been a fundamental shift in the architecture and processes in building modern web applications. In 2006, it was common to create multi-page applications using Java or .NET frameworks for many large enterprises.
These applications were monolithic in nature. Often the user experience was very tightly coupled with back-end business logic. This tight coupling more often than not lead to applications that were tough to maintain and minor changes took weeks or months to release.
Enter Angular 2
Angular 2 is much more than an application framework. The new Angular helps to bring modern best practices in web-based development to companies building large complex apps. Angular 2 helps reinforce these best practices across large teams and removes much of the confusion around how to move forward as companies move forward with technology stack migration efforts. All this while decoupling the client facing business logic from the harder to change, more strictly controlled back-end systems.
This separation of concerns allows the security and IT software release processes necessary for backend services in large organizations to be completely isolated from the rapid changes required to deliver a compelling front-end user experience. Changes to the user experience and business logic of an application can are now released in days, not months.
The new framework is a complete rewrite over Angular 1 and takes into account successes and learnings from other libraries and frameworks such as React, Ember and more.
What's new with Angular 2:
- Faster change detection than Angular 1
- Built for use with TypeScipt for fewer errors in code
- Improved debugging through Augury
- Up to 5x Improved performance over Angular 1
- Strong design patterns to keep development teams working in a similar manner
- Server Side Rendering for Speed and SEO.
- Improved stack traces
- Support for the Shadow DOM
- Improved Testability
- Component friendly
- Server-side rendering
- Easier to understand API
- Built-in command line interface for standardised template creation and code management across teams
- Vast improvements to generated template code in speed, size and efficiency
- Load only what's needed.
Why Switch?
Besides the speed, stability, and efficiency gain Angular 2 provides, the developer experience of Angular 2 is vastly improved. It is a straightforward platform to reason about, with an easier to understand API.
Organizations can move to a customer-focused development model that allows for A/B testing and other experimentation to ensure the highest possible quality web, mobile and desktop experiences.
Omnichannel development with a shared codebase is a reality for more and more applications given the advances in Angular 2 and the modern web browser. Mobile applications that traditionally would have to be coded in Swift for iOS and Java for Android can now be built using technologies like Ionic 2 and NativeScript with higher efficiency as well as speeds that are almost identical to their traditional native counterparts. Maintenance, the speed of change and deployment of applications across channels can be vastly accelerated over more traditional development models. A lean, rapid development paradigm using Angular 2 will decrease an organization’s time to market and ultimately lead to a most cost efficient customer focused solution.