Everything About Angular Latest Version: Angular 8 Feature Updates

Most prominent JavaScript Framework for mobile and desktop app, unveiled its latest version of Angular 8 with fascinating features.

Angular 8 is here! So what do you expect from this most recent version of the open-source app development framework?

Before moving towards gaining an insight into Angular 8 features, let’s help you understand the basic concept of Angular and AngularJS.

What is Angular?

Angular is also referred to as AngularJS or Angular.js is an open-source desktop and mobile framework for handling the front-end app development process. This javascript-based framework was originally developed as a complete tool and praised for allowing developers and designers to interact with both front-end and back-end modes of an application.

It’s being widely utilized by today’s smart developers to create not only interactive but also technically sound apps that perform in the long run for the clients’ business success.

Angular was first developed as AngularJS which was launched in 2009 to help developers handle the downfalls of HTML. Gradually, it has become the best open-source framework known for creating single-page applications. There’s as such no Angularjs version history after the launch of Angular 2, the versions are usually called the successors of Angular. For example, Angular 4.0, Angular 5.0 and so on.

Striking features of AngularJS:

• Allows convenient event handling
• Complete JavaScript MVW Framework
• Built-in Template Engine and Routing
• Form validation and animation
• Extend HTML support by integrating attributes, tags, and expressions
• Validated dependencies injection
• Supports Data Binding

The development industry has been tremendously utilizing Angular 7 on a large scale. This JavaScript framework also provides dependency injection, which is certainly useful for assembling the data services for different applications. And it does this all by using the HTML template which is used to compose components.

Unlike AngularJS, angular also allows developers to compose components with a definite HTML component that seamlessly connects to TypeScript code running for imperative parts of the program. But with the introduction of Angular 8, things have become far easier as angular development services providers and developers can seamlessly integrate and manage the single-page mobile app development process in a go.

Let’s dive deep into the battle of Angular Vs AngularJS.

Difference Between AngularJS and Angular

By going through the above definition and difference table, you must have got an idea about what Angular and Angularjs actually are. Keeping the basic aspects in mind, we would like you to proceed with the latest Angular 8 and its unprecedented features updates.

About Angular 8: Recent Update

So far, developers have not been completely habitual of using angular 7 for their projects and here comes another Angular version update for the same i.e., Angular 8. Yes, we are talking about Angular's latest version (Angular 8.0) which is almost here to surprise developers with its amazing functional updates.

It’s really like another one of the best Angular milestones achieved by the development community. Come along and know the best features of Angular 8 with all its prominent performance improvements.

What’s New in Angular 8?

In comparison to the Angularjs current version or you can say the previous angular version (Angular 7), Angular 8 has come up with a lot of functional updates and performance advancement. Developers can now look forward to utilizing this Angular latest version to create modern-gen applications combined with CLI APIs web worker support, differential loading, and many other functions.

This has become a major Angular upgrade that covers the framework along with its material design concepts. This is not the end, rather the update is still improving in terms of app loading speed on all the major browsers.

1. By Default Differential Loading

At the time of building applications, Angular will create a separate bundle of polyfills which completely depends on your browser list file. This will lead you to the process below:

Angular 8 is being introduced with this amazing feature which decreases the bundle size and helps developers build highly compressed applications.

The feature works by building additional files with polyfills that are precisely injected through nomodule attributes.

You can take a look at the semantic coding through below coding example:

2. Lazy Loading With Dynamic Imports

The feature of Lazy loading is custom and was built for the developers' toolkit since the birth of Angular. With the Angular latest version, this feature has completely being deprecating the loadChildren:string syntax which so far supports to load the application modules lazily.

Before update the syntax used to run like:

loadChildren: './lazy/lazy.module#LazyModule';

After Angular 8 feature introduction, the module is like:

loadChildren: () => import('./lazy/lazy.module').then(m => m.LazyModule)

3. Support for Web Worker Bundling

Web worker in this latest Angular version is being added as the best alternatives when you’re into CPU-intensive tasks. This feature speed-up the application performance along with improving parallelizability. Web workers perform by writing the code off the main application thread and offload it to a separate background thread.

4. Improved Support for TypeScript

Angular 8.0 is in the market which also welcomed TypeScript 3.4 and allows updating the application’s TypeScript version without trouble and failing.

This angular version feature is known as the update of dependencies which provides an excellent way to synchronize it with the current ecosystem. This feature also ensured greater benefits when developers wish to generate easily readable and clean JavaScript codes.

5. Use of SVG as a Template

With Angular 8, developers can now use SVG files as a template. Earlier, they only had the access or option to use inline HTML or external HTML syntax as a template. It’s the best feature that app builders can utilize to save a lot of time and effort.

6. Ivy Rendering Engine

Ivy is basically the prime feature of this latest Angular version release. This feature is still in the experimental phase and if anyone wants to use it in an application, he can use it with enable-ivy flag set to true. Right now, it’s not fully functional but, yes one can use it to improve View Engine functionality.

One can enable Ivy by in an existing project by setting enableIvy option in the angularCompilerOptions in the project’s tsconfig.app.json.

"angularCompilerOptions": {"enableIvy": true}

Further, you can create a new app with a new Engine by using the below syntax.

$ ng new my-app --enable-ivy

You will get various advantages by using Ivy, like:

• Improved Type checking for templates
• Faster Compilation
• Backward compatibility
• Smaller Bundle of Size
• Debug templates

7. Builders API

This new version of the Angular framework allows developers to use Builders API, which is also known as Architect API. Here, Angular 8 uses builders for a few main operations like:
serve, build, test, lint, and e2e. The best part is that you can see the builders used in your angular.json file.

8. Bazel Support

With Angular 8.0, it’s now possible to create a CLI application easily and precisely. It’s because Bazel is here with a new Angular version update. This feature was developed and used by Google to build a tool that can function with different language inputs.

You can add Bazel support by using the given command line.

ng add @angular/bazel

Creating a new app has now become easier with Bazels. Use the code below to get it right.

$ npm install -g @angular/bazel
$ ng new my-app --collection=@angular/bazel

Benefits of introducting of Bazel support in the latest Angular update:

• Users can use the same tool to build front-end applications and back-end app modules.
• There are possibilities to get cache and remote builds on build farm.
• This new feature will also guide developers to declare the tasks with clear input and output.
• It also allows incremental builds and tests, thereby bringing improvement by getting rebuild time.

9. Enhanced Support for Service Worker

Service worker was tremendously running in Angular 7 and have now been updated with exceptional potential to build PWAs with exceptional improvements.

• The best improvement is SwRegistrationOptions which has been added to the latest Angular version.
• The next is that this feature provides support to multiple apps in one domain.

10. Support for Location AngularJS API

Here, with the location service feature, the Angular team initiated to offer enhanced support to all the developers who are using the AngularJS framework and want to upgrade to Angular. In the Angular 8s, the community has added support for a $location service when you upgrade to the new version. You will be given a new package angular/common/upgrade.

New location feature helps developers with the following advantages:

• Add the ability to track location changes.
• It allows developers the ability to retrieve the actual state from location service.
• Using the location service feature will also allow reading hostname protocol port search properties that were previously available in AngularJS.
• To test the location service, the feature was also added to the MockPlatformLocation API.

It was all about the latest Angular version 8 and its groundbreaking feature updates.

Let’s move to the next section of the article which is Angular 7 and prominence across the development market.

Prominence Of Angular 7

Angular 7 has been broadly used by developers to develop single-page robust applications. It’s the Angular last version that has become the best framework that has created an extended niche for offering technically-sound and robust apps.

However, both the Angular versions 7 and 8 have many similar features, the only difference is that there are a few updates that have been made to ensure better product performance in the long run.

Angular 7 is in the demand and it’s expanding to the entire platform including:

• Angular Material
• Core Framework
• CLI

Notable Features Of Angular 7

Different functions are added to the Angular 7 that are described below:

• Angular 7 is added with a new interface - UrlSegment[] to CanLoad interface
• This angular version is added another new interface - DoBootstrap interface
• Angular 7 has come up with a new compiler - Compatibility Compiler (ngcc)
• Angular 7 supports Typescript 2.9.
• This version was introduced to a new Pipe called - KeyValuePipe.
• It is added with new router features like it warns when navigation is triggered outside the Angular zone.
• Introduced in new elements features that enable Shadow DOM v1 and slots when properly used.
• This framework is added with a new “original” placeholder value based on extracted XMB.
• Integrated with new mapping features for ngfactory and ngsummary files to their modules in the AOT summary resolver.
• Angular 7 is running with a new compiler support dot (.) used in import statements to avoid a crash in ngc-wrapped.
• Incepted in the market with the new ability to recover data from malformed URLs.
• Updated Angular 7 compiler to flatten nested template fns.

How to Update From Angular 7 to Angular 8?

Like always, updating Angular from a previous version to the updated one is quite easy and followed by simple steps. Here’s how you can do it seamlessly:

As Angular developers are habitual of incorporating the latest mobile app development trends along with regular version updates, they usually update or migrate the Angular latest version by running a single line command. It automatically migrates the lazy load route imports to a new import syntax.

ng update @angular/cli @angular/core

Use it and start migrating the older Angular to the latest version.

Besides, you should also keep a few points in mind to carry out the Angular update from version 7 to 8.

• During the migration, syntax errors might be encountered and it’s because of the presence of TypeScript 3.4. This might further lead to some problem that you didn’t found previously with any Angular version.
• Here, you need to use Node.js version 12 or the other latest version with effectiveness and without failing. Now run the $ nod-v command to check which Node version is the best and which one you’re using to get the migration right. If the version you’re using is the old one, update it to the latest one.

Moreover, if you want to update your application with the Angular Material, you have to run the below command appropriately.

$ ng update @angular/material

Note: If you’re using a version older than Angular 7, you have to out a few extra efforts to migrate to the latest one. Follow the guide for appropriate Angular update.

Angular Version History

• Angular version 1.0 which is commonly known as AngularJS was launched in 2010 by Google.
• Angular 2.0 was released in September 2016
• Angular 4.0 version was introduced in March 2017
• Angular 5.0 was released in November 2017.
• Angular 6.0 version was released in May 2018.

You can have detailed information about all these Angular previous versions on different reliable sources.

Wrapping Up

The latest addition of features is amazing and is ready to hit the application development grounds by their exceptional functioning potential. You should update your previous Angular version with the Angular latest version. Angular 8 has started attaining prominence, this is the reason we’re emphasizing on upgrading to Angular 8.

Angular JS is quite often compared to react JS, and hence, it's essential for the developers to know the difference between the two.

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