Web and desktop application development has become more accessible and safer as different approaches and new frameworks have come on the market, making application development much more sophisticated. In this tutorial series, you will learn about the Angular framework that brings revolutionary changes in developing software applications.
What Is Angular?
Angular (formerly called Angular JS) is a typescript-based web application framework that supports full-stack development for building all types of web applications. It helps in creating reactive single page application (SPA) and is completely based on the concept of components. Google owns Angular, and its stable version was released on September 14, 2016. Angular's official website is https://angular.io/. Google makes sure that they release a major version of Angular every six months.
Angular has nowadays become the most popular framework for developing mobile and desktop-based web applications. It comes with a variety of features. The version over 2.0 is called Angular. Angular 1.0 was named Angular JS. The latest version of Angular comes with all the possible features you may need to build a complex and sophisticated web application for desktop and mobile. Some of the key features of Angular are components, forms, directives, dependency injection, HTTP services, pipes, etc.
What Is Single Page Application (SPA)
Single-page applications are web applications or a particular type of website that provide users with a very intuitive, responsive, and fast user experience. It is enriched with menus, multiple blocks, tiles, and interactive buttons on one page, helping users easily navigate the application. It helps to load a portion of the current page dynamically instead of reloading the entire page from the server. This is why Angular-based applications are called reactive fast-speed loading pages.
What Is Angular CLI
Angular CLI is a command-line interface tool that automates the application development process by initializing new Angular applications and maintaining them directly from a command shell. As you plan to set up your project using Angular CLI, it will show all its built-in features. You can learn about the various features that Angular provides for web application development.
Features of Angular
- Multiple platforms: Angular helps develop desktop applications for different operating systems. Native applications can also be built using Angular with Cordova, NativeScript, or Ionic.
- High performance and speed: Angular's performance is very high, and the reasons behind this high performance are:
- Angular is used as a front-end web tool and can work in conjunction with PHP, Node.js, Struts of Java, and has the ability for near-instant rendering using only CSS and HTML.
- It optimizes the web application for improved SEO
- Angular provides its applications with the ability to load faster with new component routers and single page application (SPA) support.
- Creating templates in Angular is also done with highly customized code.
- Full-stack development: This framework also provides testing (Jasmine and Karma for unit testing), accessibility, automation, and supports full-stack development with Express JS, Node.JS, and MongoDB.
- High Productivity: The angular framework provides a better yet, simple and powerful syntax for templates, CLIs, and IDEs to increase the productivity of any application development.
- UI views can be developed easily and rapidly using Angular's powerful templates.
- Intellisense and intelligent code completion IDEs and error detection editors make development smart and efficient.
- Angular's CLI can rapidly build and test components and deploy them immediately.
Overall, it can be said that Angular is a powerful tool to work with and an efficient one from the developer's perspective.
Difference Between Angular and Angular JS
| Angular | Angular JS |
|---|---|
| The name Angular became popular after Angular 2.0. | This was the common name for the first version of Angular (Angular 1.0). |
| It is a TypeScript-based framework. | It is a JavaScript-based framework. |
| It provides the feature of dynamic loading of web pages. | It does not provide such dynamic loading of pages. |
| Angular uses the concept of components as its primary building entity rather than scopes and controllers. | The older version of Angular (Angular JS) uses scope and controller as its primary application developing entity. |
| It uses TypeScript (a language of Microsoft) that provides features like OOPs, static typing, and the concept of generic programming for doing certain functions. | It uses a simple JS file that is merged with HTML pages to do certain functions. |
| It supports the feature of server-side programming. | It does not support the feature of server-side programming. |
| It uses different forms of expression syntaxes, such as [] and (). | It uses simple syntaxes that get embedded with HTML pages. |
