After finally catching up with the keynote talk at this year’s NgConf and seeing all the new features and direction Angular is moving towards, I really feel that Angular is exciting again.
Not to say it wasn’t exciting before, but when you look at what the other frameworks were doing and the way they allow you to build apps, going back to work on an Angular app wasn’t as exciting as working with something like Vue for example.
It’s not that I don’t enjoy working with Angular, I do, it’s what I specialise in, that’s things did start to appear over complex when you compare it to other approaches and how fast you can develop with them Angular was becoming too over complex and slow to work with.
Why Angular is now a better Choice for building apps
Now, with Angular v16, Angular is back as a great choice to build full-featured applications. I’d actually say that it’s better than other choices as not only can you build Angular apps using a more streamlined approach, but you get all the other features like routing, an HttpClient, a testing framework, the CLI, RxJs all as part of the framework. Removing the need to worry about what third-party library you need to bring into your project just because the framework you’ve chosen doesn’t have built-in support for it.
So what are these new features that make Angular exciting?
In version 16 there are Signals, Standalone Components (which actually came out in version 15), Server-Side Hydration, Required Inputs, and Deferred Loading (this is still in an RFC so might come in a later minor version of v16).
Plus there are a set of new developer experience-related tools that make Angular v16 even better to work with. These tools include schematics to change your NgModule-based applications to use Standalone components, support for TypeScript version 5, the ability to pass data via a route into your components directly using the Component’s inputs instead of just relying on query or path params, an improved Angular language service so imports are automatically added in your editor and so much more. To get a complete overview read this post from the Angular Blog.
Is there a new approach to Angular?
Well, with the new features in v16, Angular apps can now be built using a different approach to previous versions. If you want to build a fast, lightweight application with a few components then previously you may have looked at React or Vue, but now Angular is in that mix because an Angular app can now be developed without large Modules or complete RxJs functions. If you have a team of developers who are new to web development, then having them build an Angular app that just uses components and makes use of Signals to pass data between components (which is conceptually easier to get than RxJs when starting out) is now a great approach.
Angular can now be written in a far more streamlined and straightforward approach, then as the needs of the application grow (and that always happens) more of the features from Angular can be incorporated into the application.
So now you can build Angular apps using a different approach, no more does Angular need to be seen as this web framework where it can only build large-scale enterprise apps can. You want to get started building quickly, use Angular 16, want your team of new developers to learn a well-documented and stable framework, use Angular 16, want to start your new enterprise-level application that needs to be supported over the next 2-5 years, use Angular.
I’m looking forward to diving into Angular 16 over the next few weeks it’s good to be part of the Angular community.