What is Angular?
Official Definition, Angular is a platform that makes it easy to build applications with the web. Angular combines declarative templates, dependency injection, end to end tooling, and integrated best practices to solve development challenges. Angular empowers developers to build applications that live on the web, mobile, or the desktop.
The Angular is a platform as well as a framework which is used for building web applications using HTML and TypeScript. The Angular is written in TypeScript. It implements the core and optional functionality as a set of TypeScript libraries that we need to import into our applications in order to develop angular applications.
Why Angular?
Let us first discuss why we should use Angular 2 or the advantages of using Angular 2 to develop web applications.
Angular 2 is a new but a great framework that will provide us with a great deal of flexibility and power to develop web applications. The most important point that you need to remember is it is completely rewritten from the ground. That means it is not an up gradation from angular 1 or you can say AngularJS. It is completely rewritten from the ground. It provides lots of new features as well as lots of improvements when we compared with the AngularJS.
The Features and improvements provided by Angular 2 are as follows:
Performance Improvements in Angular Application:
The Angular 2 Framework is five times faster than the Angular 1 Framework. The reason for this is, it has faster initial loading, improved a lot on rendering time and provides a great deal of change detection. The Angular 2 not only just improve the performance, but it also has improved Dependency injection mechanism, modularity, and also provide great testability to test the Angular 2 applications. If you are confused ay the moment, then don’t worry, we will discuss all these concepts in greater detail in our upcoming articles.
Component-Based Development in Angular Application:
The most important point that you need to keep in mind is that in Angular 2 application everything is a component. That means the components or you can say angular 2 components are the basic building blocks of an Angular 2 application. The most important advantage of this component-based development approach is, it provides support the code reusability. That means we can reuse the same component in multiple places. This Component-based development approach also provides great support for unit testing the Angular 2 application.
Angular Provides Mobile Support:
The earlier versions of AngularJS or you can say Angular 1 did not provide built-in support for mobile devices compatibility. That does not mean Angular 1 applications is not run on mobile devices. It is possible to run Angular 1 applications on mobile devices but to do this, we need to use other frameworks along with AngularJS 1. To keep this in mind, the Angular 2 framework is built from the ground to support mobile device compatibility by default. So if we develop an application using Angular 2 framework, then now that application can run on both desktops as well as mobile devices.
Angular 2 Support Multiple Languages:
The Angular 2 supports several languages for building Angular 2 applications. Some of the popular languages are as follows
- ECMAScript 5
- ECMAScript 6
- TypeScript
- PureScript
- Dart
- Elm
Note: Among the all available languages we are going to use the TypeScript language to develop Angular 2 applications in this course.
As we already discussed the Angular 2 is a javascript framework. The most important point is this framework is built using the TypeScript language. So let us first understand the following two key points.
- ECMAScript
- TypeScript
ECMAScript:
The ECMAScript specification is a standardized specification of a scripting language developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape; initially, it was named Mocha, later LiveScript, and finally JavaScript. There are many versions of the ECMAScript which were released starting from the ECMAScript version 1 up to ECMAScript version 9.
TypeScript:
The language TypeScript is open-source and it is developed and maintained by Microsoft. The TypeScript language provides several benefits are as follows while developing angular applications
- Intelligence support while writing code
- Auto-completion Facility
- Code navigation
- Strong Typing
- Also Supports features like classes, interfaces, and inheritance as like our traditional programming languages such as C#, Java or C##.
Because of the above benefits, most of the developers first choice language is the TypeScript for building Angular 2 applications.
Should I learn AngularJS1 before learning Angular 2/onwards?
NO, Angular is completely rewritten from the ground and is totally different from AngularJS 1, so there is no need to learn AngularJS 1 before learning Angular.
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