Angular Evolution – Version 1 to Version 9 | Version Updates

Overview

Angular has a long history of version updates. This blog is about Angular evolution from the first version to the latest version with the information about major updates in every version.

Angular is a platform to easily build web and mobile applications. Angular combines end to end tooling, dependency injection, declarative templates, and integrated best practices to solve development challenges.

It is written in pure JavaScript was intended to decouple an application’s logic from DOM manipulation, and aimed at dynamic page updates.

Angular 1.x (AngularJS)

• Angular1.x usually referred to as “Angular.js” or “AngularJS”
• It is a JavaScript-based open-source front-end web application framework.
• Maintained by Google and by a community of individuals and corporations to solve challenges that occurred during single-page application development.
• It aims to simplify both the development and the testing phase of applications by providing a framework for client-side model–view–controller (MVC) and model–view–ViewModel (MVVM) architectures, along with components commonly used in rich Internet applications.
• It was initially released in Oct 2010.
• AngularJS is written in JavaScript.

Angular 2

• Angular 2 is a complete rewrite from the same team that built AngularJS.
• It is entirely written in TypeScript.
• Angular 1.x doesn’t support mobile, where Angular 2 is mobile-oriented.
• It was released in September 2016.
• Commonly referred to as “Angular 2+”
• It provides more choices for languages. You can use any of the languages from ES5, ES6, TypeScript or Dart to write Angular 2 code.

Angular 3

• Angular 3 was skipped because the Angular team wanted to sync the angular version with the angular router version.
• The reason behind this is that mismatch in the version between @angular/core, @angular/compiler and @angular/router libraries.
• In Angular 2, version for core and router is like this

  

• Now the problem creates with the @angular/router, which is already in a 3.X version. and that’s because of some active and huge developments in the router section, like route-preload.
• Now releasing Angular as version 3, with its route on version 4 will create confusion.
• To avoid this confusion they decided to skip version 3 and release with version 4.0.0 so that every major dependency is on the right track.

Angular 4

• Angular 4 was released in March 2017.
• It is backward compatible with Angular 2 for most applications.
• There is no major change in Angular 4 from Angular 2 and it is not a complete rewrite of Angular 2.
• New changes reduce the size of the generated code for your components, faster compilation, and better bug fixes alert.
• Introduced HttpClient, a smaller, easier to use, and more powerful library for making HTTP Requests.
• Typescript: We can use typescript 2.1 or earlier only up to typescript 1.8 was supported.
• Easily add animation by importing {BrowserAnimationsModule} from @angular/platform-browser/animations into NgModule.
• No need to write a pattern for email validation in Angular 4.

Angular 5

• Angular 5 was announced to the world in November 2017.
• This release focused on making Angular smaller and faster to use.
• HttpClient: Before version 4.3, the @angular/http module was used for making HTTP requests in Angular applications. The Angular team has now deprecated @angular/http in Angular 5. It is replaced with @angular/common/http library.
  e.g. import { HttpClientModule } from ‘@angular/common/http’;
• In Angular 5, you can now give multiple names to your components and directives while exporting. Exporting a component with multiple names can help your users migrate without breaking changes.
• It shipped with a new number, date, and currency pipes that increase standardization across browsers and eliminate the need for i18n polyfills.

Angular 6

• Angular 6 is released with Angular CLI 6 and Material 6.
• The 6th version is released in May 2018 proves to be a major breakthrough and is the latest release from the Angular team after Angular 5.
• Updated Angular CLI, Command Line interface: New commands added like ng-update to migrate from the previous version to current version and ng-add to quickly add application features to make the application progressive web apps.
• Updated Component Development Kit and Angular Material
• Multiple Validators: Allows multiple validators to be applicable on a form builder.
• RxJS: Reactive Extensions for JavaScript (RxJS) offers a number of functions that can be used to create new observables. These functions can simplify the process of creating observables from things such as events, timers, promises, and so on.

Angular 7

• Angular 7 was released in October 2018.
• CLI prompts: Angular CLI has updated to v7.0.2 with some features like now it will prompt users while typing commands like ng-add, ng-new and @angular/material to help you discover inbuilt SCSS support and routing.
• Angular Material & Component Development Kit (CDK): Angular 7 introduced minor visual updates and improvements in Material Design.
• Also, refresh, virtual scrolling, large lists of data, dynamic loading and unloading of parts of the DOM were the part of improvements in CDK and Angular Material.
• Drag & Drop: The @angular/cdk/drag-drop module provides a better way to easily create drag and drop interfaces.
• Virtual Scrolling: Virtual scrolling enables loading and unloading elements from the DOM based on the visible parts.

Angular 8

• Angular 8 was released in May 2019.
• Angular v8 arrives with the much-anticipated Ivy compiler as an opt-in feature.
• The most important features of Angular 8 are differential loading of modern JavaScript, dynamic imports for lazy routes, support for web workers, TypeScript 3.4 support, and Angular Ivy as an opt-in preview.

Angular 9

• Angular 9 was released in October/November 2019.
• This is a major update to Angular, which adds the new and improved Ivy compiler and runtime, faster testing, better debugging, and many more improvements.
• The most notable change is Ivy. With the release of Angular 9, Ivy is now the default compiler and runtime. Ivy improves bundle size, allows for better debugging, adds improved type checking, faster testing, enables the AOT compiler on by default, and improves CSS class and style binding.
• The Angular 9 Language Service for Visual Studio Code and WebStorm will benefit from some improvements. For example, the URL definition will become more consistent. Style URLs will be checked in the same way as template URLs.

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