Summary:
- Angular is a TypeScript framework for creating single page applications
- Angular has a modular architecture, two-way data binding, code reusability, development speed and productivity, and third-party integrations
- Angular's Command Line Interface (CLI) helps quickly generate components, services, and pipes
- TypeScript helps with static typing and design-time safety
- Angular vs React or Angular vs Vue is a question that depends on one's use case, team size, and more
Angular is a TypeScript (“safer” JavaScript) framework for creating single page applications. The main benefits are the first-party integrations, modularity, and overall robustness.
The story of Angular reaches all the way back to 2009, when Miško Hevery developed the initial version of what later became AngularJS. The open-source version of the framework in 2010 by Google. The framework later became a universally disliked piece of software, though It was a step that the web development community needed to take to get to where it is now. Angular 2 (as some call it) or simply Angular, is the update to AngularJS, that developers use to create apps. Counterintuitively, AngularJS is NOT the same thing as Angular. The earlier framework is now not maintained. The present version of Angular 2 or Angular is version 15 (as of December 2022).
Angular apps consist of modules. They will have at least one module, called AppModule, and are marked using NgModule. You may have more pieces than just the main, root one. Each piece of an app will have important information, such as components that it uses, what it exports, other modules that it uses, and more.
The fine-grained control, and the need to specify everything explicitly, helps in case of large applications. The fact that such information is contained within modules that are similarly named, and look almost the same, further helps to reduce the mental effort it takes to develop an app.
Two-way data binding is an easy way to enable dynamic data in an app. The way you use it is by using the “banana in a box” pattern. While some developers argue that such bindings decrease the performance of apps, if you keep them within reasonable bounds, you won’t face any issues.
Dependency Injection (DI), and other features, enable teams to create reusable chunks of code that may get executed in select places. DI passes an object to another object which it requires to complete a given task.
The Command Line Interface (CLI) that the framework ships with, is another huge benefit. You can create components, services, pipes and other features quickly. You may also generate a project of the right type with just one command.
Angular provides an easy way to integrate with third-party libraries or technologies. You may use specialized libraries, such as NgRx for state management, GraphQL for fetching data from a server, Storybook for a superb UI performance, Scully for improving the Core Web Vitals (and adjusting Angular to better fit to the JAM-stack), and others. There are also such libraries as Angular Bootstrap, Angular Material or Suave UI to make prototyping much faster.
As we have checked before, Google’s framework for creating web apps will also run on Astro.
TypeScript (TS) is a superset of JavaScript (all JavaScript is valid TypeScript, but not the other way around). Web developers use TS for better design-time safety. This effectively means, that they may see, ahead of time (before the code runs) that there might be a problem with their code. Previously, they had to run the code or run tests to find that out. Not anymore.
As we mentioned already, Angular’s CLI is a great tool. It allows for easy and quick creation of multiple types of files, and even projects.
React Native (RN) is not the only cross-platform framework for creating mobile apps in the JavaScript world. While surely it is the most popular one, there is also NativeScript (NS). There is less overhead when running these apps when compared to frameworks such as Cordova.
Ionic is another framework for running Angular in mobile apps. It’s much less performant than NS or RN, although it’s surely an option. The approach Ionic and Cordova take is packaging a website into an app.
Angular’s Dependency Injection (DI) system is a great tool for managing components. It allows for declarative configuration and enables us to create our own scopes with ease. With DI, the developers can assign responsibility to different parts of the application and make them interchangeable. This makes it easier to manage code in more complex applications.
Angular Universal is a framework designed to assemble websites (or their cores) on the server before sending everything to browsers. It massively improves loading times, and Core Web Vitals by running JavaScript on our side.
Another benefit is the Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While Google claims that its bot evaluates JavaScript when it navigates to a page, it is still beneficial to render everything on our side before deploying everything to wherever you are hosting your site.
Angular is a great framework with many features, that enable developers to create amazing single page applications. The benefits include the modular architecture, two-way data binding, reusability of code, development speed and productivity, third-party integrations, and more. While the robust system of official libraries reduces the number of innovations, it makes for a robust framework. React will have more features, and it does already have the support for streaming (HTML gets sent to browsers at different times, whenever it's ready), and other features, but developers must look for a third-party library for almost all functionality besides the core one.
If you're looking for a framework to create a single page application, Angular is a great option with many features and benefits. If you are looking for the answer to the question Angular vs React or Angular vs Vue, then there is no simple answer. It all depends on your use case, how many people are there in your team, and more. If you would like a specific answer tailored to your company, feel free to get in touch with us.
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