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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.

Online shopping continues to rapidly grow in the U.S. and global markets, yet most retailers are still figuring out how to do business in an omnichannel world. E-commerce driven companies like Amazon, on the other hand, are crushing brick and mortar focused retailers in online shopping revenue. More than half of every $1 of retail e-commerce growth in the U.S. is already earned by Amazon, according to a recent report by Macquarie Research. Traditional retailers are also losing ground in store-front sales across America with Amazon grabbing 24 percent of total retail growth in 2015.

Unit tests can be an invaluable tool in the developers toolbox. You don't need to be a strict TDD purist to make unit testing worthwhile. Once you get into the flow of writing tests, it can be rather satisfying to watch the Nyan Cat Reporter go across your screen as the number of tests passing increase.

Update: This post was written just after Angular's version 2.0 release. In that era the Angular CLI project was just getting started. Today they provide a complete build package so you should go over to their site if you want to get started right away.

Angular 2 RC5 was released was released last week. Looking through the change log of bug fixes and new features shows a lot of progress has been made. However, I experienced a sinking feeling after reading several pages of Breaking Changes about the introduction of @NgModule and changing how we need to bootstrap our applications.

Because Rangle is a consultancy, we have the opportunity to work with many different clients over a relatively short period. Over the last two years, we’ve been able to refine a lean discovery process that allows us to rapidly align our teams with our clients and lay the groundwork for establishing clear communication channels on day one. What I realized over this time was something I had learned early in my career as a graphic designer pitching to upper management: the first experience you design is for your stakeholders.

This post was last updated 08/12/2016. One of the nicest changes in Angular 2 is the new template syntax. The declarative nature of the brackets around a property and parentheses around events initially worried many people but it has really grown on me.

As Redux is becoming more popular within the Angular community, it's not always clear how to bridge the gap between working with Redux and how to make it fit naturally with Angular 2.