Angular is a frontend web application development framework based on TypeScript, built by folks at Google and heavily contributed to by a huge community of developers around the world. It is a Single Page Application (SPA) framework, which means that Angular is capable and is primarily used to build single page web applications or SPAs.
Angular is developed by the same team of individuals that developed the popular framework AngularJS. The modern Angular requires you to have knowledge of the Typescript language which is a strict syntactical superset of JavaScript and adds optional static typing and some other features to the language that otherwise JavaScript lacks.
The AngularJS framework was re-written and called “Angular 2”, but this led to a lot of confusion and panicwithin the developer community. To clarify, the Angular team started to use separate terms for each framework. At this point, “AngularJS” now referred to the 1.X versions and “Angular” without the “JS” referred to versions 2 and up. Since then, all the versions of the framework other than 1.X are just called Angular. You can, however, mention the version number to be more precise.
TypeScript is designed for development of large applications and transpiles to JavaScript. As TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, existing JavaScript programs are also valid TypeScript programs. So, you can still use JavaScript in your TypeScript code files, but please do not do that.
In this article, we will take a closer look at how Angular has evolved into one the mostpopular web development frameworks and understand its pros, cons, features and more. We will leave you with a few quick tips and suggest how you can get started with understanding Angular indepth to achieve mastery over the subject.
**History of Angular **
AngularJS was the first version of the framework, created by Google, that first came out in 2010and it shook the developer community. There were so many amazing features that AngularJSoffered. Most talked and loved of all the features that it offered was two-way binding between the view and the model.
So, it let us developers get rid of a lot of useless code to set up bindings and keep the view and model in sync at all times. AngularJS was golden. AngularJS became very popular within the developer community and was widely adopted.It received a lot of traction. Still, the team decided to take another step further and developed a new version which was initially named Angular 2 but later was called Angular without the “JS” part.
Soon after, in 2014, Angular 2.0 was announced which was a complete rewrite of the framework from scratch and unlike AngularJS that used JavaScript as the primary language, it used TypeScript. A final version of the framework, Angular 2, was released in 2016. Later, it was renamed to Angular to avoid conflicts and confusions within the developer community.
A lot of new changes were brought in and developers had to learn it all over again which was a tough change but was welcomed by the community. Angular opted for semantic versioning and from now on, all versions of Angular will just be called Angular.
Near the end of 2016, Angular 4 came out (yeah, they skipped Angular 3 to avoid some conflicts and confusions).With a few more major versions and performance upgrades in each version, we have now arrived (at the time of writing of this article) to Angular 9.
Angular 9 has better than ever performance and latest features. In these intermediate versions, there have been updates to the performance, CLI features, progressive-web app features, router, and a lot more. They even upgraded to a better rendering engine in Angular 9.
Angular 10, a major upgrade to the popular web development framework, has reached the release candidate stage, with six release candidates published as of June 17, 2020. The upgrade to the Google-developed, TypeScript-based framework focuses more on ecosystem improvements than new features.
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