Angular has been on an incredible journey over the past year, and last week; I had the privilege of sitting down with the Angular team to delve into the intricate nuances of its current state and its promising future. You could say, they answered the signal. Okay, I jest. (I’ll stop)
Our conversation revolved around the “hand-in-hand” nature between Angular and Enterprise development, covering well-anticipated topics such as Signals, the new control flow, and SSR enhancements. However, what truly stood out were the numerous other intriguing facets that emerged during our dialogue. In this article, I’ll explore these hidden gems that hold the potential to shape the future of Angular in the enterprise world.
Angular is LIT
That’s fire
No, not that lit…
Angular isn’t this old…
Not that Lit, either. You know… Angular has an awesome vibe right now. The general feeling is that large companies like where Angular is and where it’s going. Google has officially named Angular as it’s recommended framework for websites and it finally looks as if the Angular team, and more importantly Google, are going to finally start pushing Angular to javascript boot camps and schools. It’s hard to win the framework battle if the market share is starting in the schools and those students are never making a shift to Angular.
Another important thing to note is that many companies are actively hiring devs. Oftentimes, companies are willing to take any developer with javascript experience; more devs just need to get out of their comfort zone and make the jump to Angular.
Reactivity Approaches
We’ve been hearing about Signals for about a year now and nothing has changed there, other than the roadmap for how they plan on releasing certain parts of Signals in conjunction with the new control flow.
As of right now, if you’re an enterprise developer, there is very little benefit to drop everything and make a shift to current architecture or to a Signals architecture. You’re not really getting anything for making the switch. There are no performance improvements – yet – but there will be. One of the cool things that was discussed is that even though RxJS will be optional in Angular, there are still very major things that need to be changed. Things will need to have interoperability; things that are just ingrained in the Angular ecosystem that relies heavily on RxJS (forms is a big one), as well as backwards compatibility.
There was a question asked about best practices and architecture with Signals in the future and if the Angular team would be making best practices in that department, but they are choosing, currently, to defer to the community. I can’t wait to see what some of our community establishes as the new pattern (Looking at you Brandon Roberts).
Deferred Loading
There are a few articles out here on Medium that talk about Angular’s new defer capabilities. For many large enterprise views, this is going to be one of the “Quick implements.” The flair of Signals is one thing, but defer is actually immediately useful.
Assuming you have a block of code in a template like:
@defer (on viewport) {
<deferred-component />
}
You can defer the loading of that DeferredComponent until it actually becomes visible in the viewport. If you have large pages that require lots of scrolling where several components become visible over the course of the scroll, you can just use this syntax. In the past, you would need to use some RxJS or a MutationObserver, attached to the scroll event and detect the component’s position.
This will cut out a lot of overhead for teams when trying to create clever patterns to do something that we can knock out with a trivial HTML block. Aside from defer, there are “loading”, “error”, and “placeholder” all with their own unique template cleaning capabilities.
There were a few other updates that came out of the talk, but I’ll let the Angular team make those announcements. It’s great to see that the Angular team is listening to the community and improving DX and performance, and I think, if I were a betting man, we’ll see a trend upwards in downloads this time next year. React still has a pretty good market share, but this Angular momentum… It’s real. I can’t wait to see where it takes us.
Angular + Enterprise = ❤ was originally published in ngconf on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.