As good as the services that GCP offers are, we still need a javascript framework for the web applications that we build for our clients. That’s why Angular has been the perfect choice for us since day one. To be aware of the latest trends, I visited the AngularConnect conference in London.
AngularConnect
AngularConnect is a 2-day conference in London where speakers from all around the world are invited to talk about, you guessed it, Angular.
The reason why this year’s AngularConnect was more exciting than the previous editions is very simple: Angular 2 had been released a few weeks before the event, and it’s a version that people were looking forward to ever since Google announced it in 2014.
Most of the speakers were people who actually wrote Angular, but there were also speakers like Todd Motto and Joe Eames: people who are pioneers in the Angular world, teach it to other people and/or have their own blogs about it. As you probably may have guessed: this attracted a whole crowd from all around the world. While a lot of the attendees were technical people like me who understand what Angular is about, there also were other profiles present, such as managers who wanted to know if their company should start using it, startup founders who were looking for a technology for their brand new website, beginning programmers who wanted to learn a language,…
Some talks that I found particularly interesting were:
- Angular Material 2 by Jeremy Elbourn and Kara Erickson (with live coding!)
- From .component() to @Component by Todd Motto
- Why I am betting my future on Angular 2 by Shai Reznik
If you want to get to know more about Angular 2, but you don’t want to go too technical, I definitely recommend watching the talk by Shai Reznik.
Angular versus Angular 2
Angular
What is Angular all about? Angular is a framework for Javascript. Javascript is code that runs on your PC, most websites that you visit every day have Javascript code running on them, they take care of the interactivity of websites.
Like all Javascript frameworks, Angular is based on Javascript itself. It’s an abstraction layer above it, a way to make it easier for the developer to write Javascript. It takes care of many things that would be hard and/or tedious for developers to accomplish using “just” Javascript. Code should be well structured and easily readable for your fellow developers, so that they can get up to speed with your code quickly and start contributing to it. Angular helps doing that. There are many other frameworks that (try to) do the same thing Angular does, just in different ways. Despite all the competition Angular remains one of the most popular Javascript frameworks.
Furthermore it is written and maintained mainly by the Angular core team that works for Google. While these people are the biggest contributors, there’s several other developers that have no affiliation with Google whatsoever but who also helped writing Angular. This is possible because Angular is an open-source project. This means that anyone who can write code can contribute to Angular since the source is publicly available.
Angular 2
Now, why should you care that Angular 2 has been released? Perhaps you or your employees have always programmed in Angular 1 and everything worked perfectly fine, why switch?
I think there are 3 important points that make moving to Angular 2 worth it and even necessary:
- It’s new, since Angular 2 solves problems X Y & Z that we know in AngularJS, a lot of developers will move over to Ang2 and AngJS, together with it’s support, will be faded out (Angular 1 support will be dropped once the majority uses Angular 2)
- It’s been made easier for developers to build web applications even faster
- It’s faster, more performant
Look at cars 20 years ago… Everything worked perfectly fine. If you went for a holiday, you could just use a map for directions. In winter you’d turn up the heating to get warm faster. But let’s admit: aren’t we happy the car industry has evolved and we have integrated GPS’s and heated seats now?
I’m not saying Angular 2 is to Angular 1 what cars now are to cars 20 years ago, but it’s definitely a big improvement (on top of that Javascript evolves a lot faster than cars do) and is something worth jumping on. Oh and if you ever wonder if the official name is AngularJS or Angular: the Angular team was asked the very same question and you should call it “just Angular” from now on.
If you’re interested to learn more, here’s the link to the Angular Connect Youtube channel where you can find all the talks.
Written by Robin Hellemans
