Angular 2 history, wrt ReactJS and future
Hi I'm very experienced in Angular 2, as I got into it in Dec 2014 and developed app'ns in alpha| beta| RC| and finally the full release 2.0.0) since Sept 2016. I have a 2000+ training SPA in Angular 2 all about Angular 2 and have written hundreds of applications. Most developers only have 6 months in Angular 2.
(PS coding Angular 1 since 2012 and .NET since 2002)
I'm now developing in Angular 4 rc 1 (ie. 02 Mar 2017) using @Angular/cli.
I consider Angular 2+ as one of the most important and great advances in front end technologies to have come out for years-due to take the programming world by storm.
Angular (Google) vs ReactJS (Facebook)
Many companies have gone down the ReactJS root as it is faster than AngularJS (Angular 1.x) although it is just a UI library compared to Angular's full framework. Google, in taking 2 years to get Angular 2 out (2.0.0 in Sept 2016) is finally catching up and more companies are starting to see its advantages over React.
Angular 2, written in TypeScript (based on the new EcmaScript stds) making it modern and much easier to write compared to JavaScript. It is faster than ReactJS due to its unidirectional data flow and the use of zones for change detection and sits on top of RxJS (using Observables and many RxJS operators).
It has many other features to make it even faster, if you know what your doing - AoT Compilation| Lazy loading| Angular Universal (Server Side Angular) | web workers.
It now uses Webpack 2 as a loader which means Tree-shaking is available by default to minimize the size and if you use the Closure compiler - it gets even smaller.
(PS You might hear that Closure is incompatable with TypeScript but Google have created a couple of small libs to make them compatable).
Angular 2 is mobile friendly - due to its architecture being split into a core and a separate rendering engine - hence you can render to Web (using the DOM)
| Mobile - hybrid (Cordova and Ionic2) or NativeScript | Desktop (Skeleton)
It also helps with the apps look and feel with Material Design (Angular Material 2)
- though its still in Beta-2.
Scalability
It is heavily based around Components and Modules both of which aid scalability but for very large scale app'ns - you can use versions of Redux (ie. ngRx)
For visualization for charts etc. a lot of companies use d3, but Angular 2 has its own charting tool - ngx-charts (which uses d3 internally) but uses Angular to render the charts and hence simplifies the programming for the developer.
New Versions - Angular 2 is trying to roll out a new version every 6 months - hence Angular 4 (Mar 17) | Angular 5 (Sept 17) | etc. Althouth they will have minor releases every week or so to add small features to the framework.
For the last 8 - 9 months I've been working in Angular 2 - 7 days a week and normally 15 hours per day. I have given lectures on Angular 2 to both groups and companies and am always learning new information on it, Nobody knows it all, as its always being enhanced.
Next time I'll try and include some demo code Gordon T Cumming BSc MSc Cert Ed
