Angualr — Among Our Favorite Frontend Frameworks
Angular is one of the top 3 frontend frameworks used worldwide and a staple in our tech stack. Find out what makes it an ideal framework for enterprises.
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The popularity of Angular today is the result of the success story of AngularJS. Its initial release in 2010 marked the beginning of a technology whose potential was widely acclaimed, which is why it has been maintained and supported all the way up to now. In 2016, a TypeScript-based rewrite of AngularJS by the same Google team was released under the name of Angular. Since then, Angular has witnessed a meteoric rise thanks to its many features that make it the ideal framework for enterprises.
Angular for large-scale apps
When developers choose Angular as framework for their application, they should do so because they know they will make use of its great wealth of functionality. Compared to similar technologies such as React and Vue, Angular is a solution for large-scale enterprise apps – its size makes it unsuitable for ones that are smaller or only serve a small function within a web platform.
What is more, it is a very opinionated framework, i.e. there are well-defined best practice style guides that developers should adhere to. While this makes the development team easily scalable since new developers are not required to familiarize themselves with a custom style, it does make other options like React more convenient if you wish to deviate from that style guide. The latter is not as prescriptive and therefore affords developers more liberties in terms of their coding style.
Why Angular stands out
01
Complete solution
Whereas other frameworks often have to be supplemented with libraries to build a complete application, Angular offers most of what you need out of the box. Among these are essential features such as routing capabilities, hassle-free authorization (AuthGuard), internationalization, lazy-loading and a rendering engine (Ivy) that keeps bundle sizes compact.
02
Plannability
The development of Angular is regulated by consistent release cycles, with major releases being delivered every six months and minor ones every three months. They always adhere closely to the roadmap laid out by the developers of Angular and can therefore be easily considered in sprint planning. Thanks to that, there can be no unexpected updates interfering with project and budget planning.
03
Compatibility
The fact that Angular offers so much functionality out of the box is also of great value in another crucial element of development: compatibility. Features such as Routers that Angular already offers by itself (and which in other frameworks often have to be added as external dependencies) are subject to the same update cycles and can therefore never cause compatibility issues. In another way, this is also true of Angular libraries: Angular is based on TypeScript and so are all the libraries for it — where with other frameworks, having to include JavaScript-only libraries often leads to extra workload, this is not the case in Angular.
04
Modularity
Developing with Angular according to best practices means following a modular, vector-oriented approach as regards code architecture (similar to React and Vue). In addition, creating modules and component services is greatly facilitated by a template-based code-generation tool called CLI Schematics. When it comes to creating company-internal code in general, the use of additional tools like Nx makes it easy to develop libraries which can then be used within multiple apps inside the company.
05
Stability
There are many things that contribute to Angular being a reliable and future-proof technology. On the one hand, there are no sudden, unexpected changes. Even when major updates cause breaking changes, there’s a tool by Angular that shows the lines of code that need to be adapted in order to make them work with the update. On the other hand, Angular is being developed by Google who utilize it themselves for many of their platforms. Coupled with an extensive community, the support of the framework is unlikely to wane any time soon.
Libraries for Angular
Among the most prominent of libraries commonly used with Angular is undoubtedly NgRx. It facilitates state management much the same way Redux does for React. Its use makes it possible to accomplish a lot with very little code and drastically reduces the classic boilerplate code which you would otherwise find in Angular apps. Other libraries that serve similar functions are NGXS and MobX.
