Hi, everybody! Nowadays many people are interested in the IT field, especially different frameworks.
It doesn’t matter who you are, the professional programmer, coder, businessman or beginner.
I am sure you are aware of AngularJS. Nevertheless, only a few of you know the History of AngularJS.
AngularJS is a JavaScript open-source framework. It is widely used by front-end developers to produce user interfaces worldwide.
AngularJS offers a wide range of functionalities, features, and benefits.
But the main idea of Angular is combining well-known elements, patterns and development practices in one framework that is simple to use and encourages following the best practices of web development.
With the help of AngularJS, you can build single-page apps (SPA) or one-page applications.
AngularJS was developed in 2009 with the help of Misko Hevery (a developer at Google) and his friend Adam Abrons.
It was considered only a side project in addition to their main work.
That project was an end-to-end web development tool that would have offered an online JSON storage service and also a client-side library to build web applications depending on it.
In order to publish their tool, they took the GetAngular.com hostname.
Let me introduce all versions of Angular:
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AngularJS
Version 1 is officially called AngularJS and is still in development right now. Version 1.8 was released on August 4, 2020.
The first version of Angular is actually Javascript based, and programmers have to write codes in JavaScript, so it looks like it’s easy to learn and doable and employers can easily find candidates. But in terms of execution, the programming community has been compared to ReactJS. Many software development companies want to build a new product, consider using another version of Angular, not the first one.
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Angular 2
Since version 2, it has the official name Angular. Angular 2 was released on September 14, 2016. It was a full rewrite of the first version. Angular from version 2 onwards has a completely different mindset compared to Angular1. This change is made with the ambition to help Angular to beat ReactJS.
However, as an upgrade to Angular 1, Angular 2 uses TypeScript which is a superset of JavaScript and helps in building more structures and robust codes.
The new version of Angular was highly modular, component-based and comes with a new and improved dependency injection model and a whole lot of programming patterns that AngularJS has never heard of.
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Angular 4
Apparently, you think that I have forgotten about Angular 3. This is not the truth. All package names were assigned to version 2, but the router package by mistake was given to version 3. That’s why developers skipped Angular 3 and named the new version Angular 4.
Despite the thing, that Angular 2 was a total rewrite of AngularJS, there was a little difference between Angular 2 and Angular 4. There were only some improvements and backwards compatibility with the previous version.
I propose to look at some other features of Angular 4:
- It reduces the size of the generated bundled code up to 60%
- Animation moved out to a separated package @angular/animations
- Supports for if/else statement
- Provides the support for email validator
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Angular 5
The release of the next version was on November 1, 2017. In Angular 5 were made some bigger changes compared with Angular 4. In this version, there is a Build Optimizer created with the Angular CLI. It gives you an opportunity to apply build optimizer by default. Apart from this, there is an Angular Universal State Transfer also given that supports API and DOM.
The features of the new version are:
- Make AOT the default
- Easier to make advanced web applications
- Type checking in pattern
- Support for Internationalized Number, Date, and Currency Pipes
- An update to Http client
- Zone speed improvements
- New Router Lifecycle Events
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Angular 6
Angular 6 was released in April 2018. This version was mostly focused on improving the general consistency of the framework and its toolchain. So, it is mainly a maintenance release. That is why there were no huge changes. Also, there was a representation of a new way of providers’ register – RxJS 6 support.
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Angular 7
Next new version, Angular 7 was introduced in October 2018. Beyond doubt, it was a crucial update. Stephen Fluin (Developer Relations Lead at Google) said “This is a major release spanning the entire platform, including the core framework, Angular Material, and the CLI with synchronized major versions. This release contains new features for our toolchain, and it has enabled several major partner launches.”
Here are some new features in this version:
- Easy upgrade
- CLI prompts
- Angular Material & CDK
- Partner launches
- Updated dependencies
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Angular 8
Angular 8 was released on May 29, 2019. This version is merely about Ivy and the capability to try it. Also, Angular 8 has come out with a number of workflows and a new set of powerful features that Angular developers will appreciate like the core framework, Angular Material library, and the Command Line Interface.
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Angular 9
The 9th version of Angular was released on February 6, 2020. It is the main release covering the entire platform, including the framework itself, Angular material and CLI. This release switches applications to the Ivy compiler and runtime by default and introduces some improved ways to test components.
This is one of the biggest updates to Angular in 3 years, and any Angular development team is excited about the opportunities that enable developers to build better applications and contribute to the Angular ecosystem.
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Angular 10
And last, but not least, Angular 10. It was represented on June 24 this year. In this version, more attention is given to the level of quality, tool, and ecosystem improvements than to some new features.
Angular 10 is smaller than the previous versions of Angular. New possibilities contain a new date range picker in the Angular Material UI component library and warnings for CommonJS imports.
Now you know all the main versions of Angular. I hope my post was very interesting and useful for you. All the best! Bye!