Angular is a powerful platform developed by Google to create the next generation of web applications. Angular describes itself as “a platform that makes it easy to build applications with the web. Angular combines declarative templates, dependency injection, end to end tooling, and integrated best practices to solve development challenges.
Angular empowers developers to build applications that live on the web, mobile, or the desktop”, but it’s a lot more than that to the enterprise.
Angular is Opinionated
When developing web applications there are literally thousands of decisions to be made that will affect the application. Angular is built with best practices in mind and comes with libraries for HTTP requests, state management, and tools for building applications.
These defaults are continually tested by the Angular team as well as by thousands of applications built each year in the field. Angular is also flexible and allows developers to choose different libraries over the defaults, as not every application will work best with the defaults.
Angular is Scaled
Angular was created by Google to build applications for Google. Applications built by these teams often meant millions of lines of code written by hundreds or thousands of developers to be consumed by the masses that utilize Google’s services.
This meant building a platform that would support a variety of types of projects, the ability to share code, and work across workflows. The resulting component model was designed to support collaboration, reuse, and maintainability. Another big decision towards maintainability was TypeScript, as it helps developers find bugs earlier in development, makes it easier for developers new to the team to get up to speed quickly, and helps code integrity during refactors.
The component model is also built with testing in mind. The dependency injection model allows developers to mock outside dependencies and focus on the unit testing of the components. This allows for more reliable tests and better code in the long term.
Angular is Trustworthy
Angular is maintained by the Angular team and community contributors. The team is committed to careful and planned releases that have a publicly announced release schedule.
Angular has also committed to a Long Term Support version that allows enterprises to adopt changes on their own schedule.
Since Angular is a Google product, it goes through the rigorous testing infrastructure required for any Google release. In addition, because Google uses Angular across many projects internally, it ensures that there are no unintentional breaking changes.
Angular is Familiar
Developers that use Angular typically come from either AngularJS or a strongly typed language like Java or C#. AngularJS developers will already be familiar with declarative templates, dependency inject, pipes, and services. This familiarity helps to get these developers up to speed more quickly.
Developers with strongly typed language experience will recognize similar patterns like modules, components, imports, and exports. In addition, the syntax of TypeScript closely mimics Java and C#, and makes the transition smoother.
Angular has a strong Ecosystem
Angular has a strong and continually growing ecosystem of reusable tools, libraries, tutorials, training, and code samples available on the internet. The Angular CLI gives developers a reliable way of developing, serving, building, and packaging of the projects. Libraries like NgRx help to reduce the complexity of enterprise-class systems.
User Interface libraries like Angular Material help developers create professional-looking web applications with all the bells and whistles of modern apps. Testing is continually improving through tools and frameworks like Karma, Jasmine, Protractor, Cypress, and Jest. New tools and libraries are emerging each day that continually stretch the boundaries of what is known as possible.
Author: Jesse Sanders, CEO & Enterprise Principal
Companies like Briebug focus solely on Angular to help our enterprise clients navigate training, architecture reviews, and implementation of their important web applications. Briebug is one of the top web application development firms in Colorado. For more information, contact us.