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MaanavaN Learn Code > Blog > Interview > Angular History

Overview

  • Angular is a platform that makes it easy to build applications with the web. It combines declarative templates, dependency injection, end to end tooling, and integrated best practices to solve development challenges. In this post, you will get brief information of angular version history.
  • So far Angular Team has released the following Angular versions.
 

Angular JS 1.x

  • AngularJS usually referred to as “Angular.js” or Angular 1.x
  • It is a JavaScript-based open-source front-end web application framework.
  • It is mainly maintained by Google and by a community of individuals and corporations to address many of the challenges encountered in developing single-page applications.
  • It aims to simplify both the development and the testing 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 (7 years ago).

  • Angular JS code is written in JavaScript
  • Last major version release was : 1.7.x
  • Angular JS is now in Long Term Support(LTS) mode.

Official Site : https://angularjs.org/

Angular 2

Angular 2 is a complete rewrite from the same team that built AngularJS.

It is written entirely in TypeScript.

Angular 1.x was not built with mobile support in mind, where Angular 2 is mobile oriented.

It was released in September 2016.

It provides more choice for languages. You can use any of the language from ES5, ES6, TypeScript or Dart to write Angular 2 code.

Official Site : https://angular.io/

Angular 3

Angular 3 was skipped.

Reason behind this is that version mismatch between @angular/core, @angular/compiler  and @angular/router libraries.

For Angular 2 version for core and router is like this

  • @angular/core                      v2.3.0
  • @angular/compiler               v2.3.0
  • @angular/compiler-cli           v2.3.0
  • @angular/http                       v2.3.0
  • @angular/router                    v3.3.0

Now the problem is with the @angular/router, which is already in a 3.X version. and that’s because of some active and huge developments on the router section, like route-preload.

Now releasing Angular as version 3, with it’s route on version 4 will create confusion

To avoid this confusion they decided to skip the version 3 and release with version 4.0.0, so that every major dependency are on the right track.

Angular 4

  • Angular 4 was released in March 2017.

This release is backwards compatible with 2.x.x for most applications.

There is no major change in Angular 4 from Angular 2.

Angular 4 is not a complete rewrite of Angular 2

Angular team has laid emphasis on making angular apps more faster, compact .

  • Under the hood changes: New changes reduced the size of the generated code for your components by around 60% in most cases.
  • Faster Compilation
  • Better Bug fixes Alert.

Some Changes from Angular 2 : 

  • Animations being pulled out of @angular/core so as to remove the extra code being imported into our production bundle. Though you can easily add animation by importing {BrowserAnimationsModule} from @angular/platform-browser/animations into NgModule.
  • Renderer 2 in place of Renderer from same ‘@angular/core’.
  • *ngIf/else : Now you can use else clause as well .
  • No need to write a pattern for email validation in Angular 4.
  • TypeScript 2.1 and 2.2 compatibility: Finally We can use typescript 2.1 or more earlier only upto typescript 1.8 was supported.
 

Angular 5

Angular 5 was released in November 2017.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the biggest changes in v5.

Following are the important Angular 5 features :

  • Build Optimizer: production builds created with the Angular CLI will now apply the build optimizer by default.
  • Angular Universal State Transfer API and DOM Support.
  • Compiler Improvements
  • Internationalized Number, Date, and Currency Pipes
  • HttpClient : @angular/http is deprecated in Angular 5. It is replaced with @angular/common/http library.
  • HttpModule is not more use in Angular 5. It is replaced by HttpClientModule of @angular/common/http library in each of your modules, inject the HttpClient service, and remove any map(res => res.json()) calls, which are no longer needed.
  • Angular CLI v1.5 will generate v5 projects by default.
  • Angular Forms adds updateOn Blur / Submit
  • RxJS 5.5 support

New Router Lifecycle Events : GuardsCheckStart, ChildActivationStart, ActivationStart, GuardsCheckEnd, ResolveStart, ResolveEnd, ActivationEnd, ChildActivationEnd

Angular 6

  • Angular 6.0.0 was released on May 2018. It was released with Angular CLI 6 and Material 6.
  • Starting from this version angular team has synchronized the framework packages (@angular/core, @angular/common, @angular/compiler, etc), the Angular CLI, and Angular Material + CDK to version 6.0.0
  • Refer Angular 6,  Angular CLI 6 and Material 6 Features here.

Important Features Released in Angular 6, Angular CLI 6 and Angular Material 6 are

  • Two new angular cli commands added : ng update and ng add
  • Angular Elements
  • Component Dev Kit (CDK)
  • Angular Material Starter Components
  • CLI Workspaces
  • Schematics
  • Library Support
  • Tree Shakable Providers
  • Animations Performance Improvements
  • RxJS v6

For more detail information of each feature refer to Angular 6, CLI 6 and Material 6 Features and angular 6 blog by Stephen fluin.

Angular 7

  • Angular 7.0.0 was released on Oct 2018, synchronized released with Angular CLI 7 and Angular Material 7.
  • It is released with performance improvements and some interesting features like CLI Prompts, Virtual Scrolling, and Drag and Drops.

Important Features Released in Angular 7, Angular CLI 7 and Angular Material 7 are

  • CLI Prompts: The CLI will now prompt users when running common commands like ng new or ng add @angular/material to help you discover built-in features like routing or SCSS support. CLI Prompts are also added in Schematics.
  • Bundle budgets in CLI.
  • Angular Material & CDK
    1. Virtual Scrolling
    2. Drag and Drop
  • Content Projection support in Angular Elements
  • Dependency updates :
    1. TypeScript 3.1
    2. RxJS 6.3
    3. Added support for Node 10

For more detail information of each feature refer to version 7 of Angular by Stephen fluin.

Angular 8

  • Angular 8 is released in May 2019. synchronized released with Angular CLI 8 and Angular Material 8.

Important Features Released in Angular 8, Angular CLI 8 and Angular Material 8 are

  • Differential Loading by Default: It is a process by which the browser chooses between modern or legacy JavaScript based on its own capabilities.
  • Dynamic Imports for Route Configurations.
  • Builder APIs in CLI: It is an exciting feature, using this we can customize angular CLI commands like ng build ,ng test ,and ng run.
  • Workspace APIs in the CLI
  • Web Worker Support
  • Angular CLI 8.3.0 has added new UX for an initial app created using ng new.
  • ng deploy is added in Angular CLI 8.3.0

For more detail information of each feature refer to version 8 of Angular by Stephen fluin.

Angular 9

  • Angular 9 is released in Feb 2020. It is the synchronized major release with Angular CLI 9 and Angular Material 9.
  • Angular 9 came up with the most awaited Ivy compiler.

Important Features Released in Angular 9 are :

  • Ivy Compiler: From version 9 all applications are moved to Ivy compiler and runtime by default. (In angular 8 it was in opt-in mode). It provides the following advantages
    1. Smaller Bundle Size
    2. Faster Testing
    3. Better Debugging
    4. Improved CSS class and style binding
    5. Improved Type Checking
    6. Improved build errors
    7. Improved build times, enabling AOT on by default
    8. Improved Internationalization
  •  New Options for providedIn property in @Injectable Decorator, In addition to the previous root and module options, you have two additional options.
    1. platform : Specifying providedIn: ‘platform’ makes the service available in a special singleton platform injector that is shared by all applications on the page.
    2. any : Provides a unique instance in every module (including lazy modules) that injects the token.
  • Component harnesses
  • Angular Material New Component
    • Youtube player Component 
    • Google Maps Component
  • TypeScript 3.7 Support 

For more detailed information of each feature refer to Version 9 of Angular Now Available — Project Ivy has arrived! by Stephen fluin.

Angular 10

  • Angular 10 is the latest major version released in Jun 2020. This is a smaller release comparison to other major releases because of just a four-month time from the previous major release v9.
  • It is the synchronized major release with Angular CLI 10 and Angular Material 10.

Important Features Released in Angular 10 are :

  • New Angular Material Component
    1. Date Range Picker : Checkout this blog to see how to use angular material data range picker .
  • Warnings about CommonJS imports: When you use a dependency that is packaged with CommonJS, it can result in larger slower applications. Starting with version 10, we now warn you when your build pulls in one of these bundles.
  • Optional Stricter Settings
  • TypeScript 3.9
  • TSLib has been updated to v2.0
  • TSLint has been updated to v6
  • New Default Browser Configuration

For more detailed information of each feature refer to Version 10 of Angular Now Available by Stephen fluin.

Summary

  • As you have seen above Angular is constantly growing with better features and faster performance.
  • In upcoming versions, more exciting features are coming like Ivy renderer, and Bazel which are currently in opt-in previews

 

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