Keep your fingers crossed as Angular 8 update is finally out!
Angular is one of the most popular open-source web app frameworks preferred by the majority of developers for creating premium quality web apps with unique features. Powered by Google, Angular was first introduced three years back and it continued to evolve with a bundle of updates and add-ons since then. However, the recent release of Angular 8.0 version in May gathered huge attention of techies who have been leveraging this framework to build apps using the resources & tools defined in it.
All of your anticipations will end as soon as you go through this article that elaborates all major features & updates of Angular8. The update goes around the entire framework and encircles Angular Material as well as CLI with synced paramount editions. Angular 8 speeds up the load time on modern web browsers & also come up with new APIs to integrate Angular CLI. It can be said that Angular goes well with a couple of web standards & ecosystem that combine all parties to assist developers in app creation. A huge number of developers migrated to this framework for some obvious reasons. Angular developers find it easier to create a web app in a comparatively faster and lesser time frame as compared to other web app development frameworks.
The power-packed Angular 8 is added with some important features that are meant to be used with core framework, Angular material library, Angular Console, @Angular/fire, & StackBlitz. This blog will familiarize you to all major updates of Angular 8 & ways to take benefit of this framework for web app development.
Angular Ivy
Ivy is included as an opt-in preview in the latest version of Angular. Since there is a team working on Ivy renderer, it became a topic of discussion among Angular developers as this feature favours the enhancement of user experience for creating web apps. Though Ivy is introduced as a preview version, it will let developers know that whether your existing app works well with its functionality or not. Angular apps are bulky due to file size and memory use. Ivy serves these benefits that are more favourable as compared to existing Angular view engine:
- It will be easier to read and understand the codes generated by Angular compiler for humans.
- The time required in rebuilding will be reduced.
- Modern web browsers will take lesser loading time to download and run your web app as payload size is decreased.
- More accurate template type checking to identify the maximum number of errors and eliminate them during the development process.
- Though Ivy is compatible with existing Angular apps, developers can skip the process of making changes in their app.
Angular developers might face some issues with the older versions and that’s why it is suggested to switch to the latest version & Ivy.
Support for Typescript
Angular 8 comes up with the latest versions of its core dependencies such as RxJS and TypeScript. It is a significant improvement for Angular as Typescript includes some features that are crucial for the development process.
Angular 8 support for web workers
The extensive support for bundling web workers with the CLI is a new feature with Angular 8 update. Now the front end developers will start using web workers rather than focusing on a single thread used by the majority of apps. Knowing that codes that run in the worker can’t be used in the same JavaScript file, Angular 8 simplifies web worker bundling to bring down the complications. Angular CLI also brings another new feature named as opt-in usage sharing that provides an option to stretch out the CLI usage to the Angular team.
CLI workflow improvements
With the current Angular 8 update, the command will extend its support to 3rd-party libraries & tools as CLI continues to improve with ng build, ng test, and ng run. For instance, AngularFire includes new capabilities along with a deploy command.
Differential loading
Apps based on Angular 8 will match the performance standards due to differential loading. For web app development, two bundles are created for production, one for older browsers that support ES5 version of JavaScript and other for modern browsers that are compatible with its ES2015+. The browser will automatically support the correct bundle due to its compatibility with E56 modules in the newer browsers. Since the new feature abides by the largest single performance improvement for Angular v8, modern browsers will load less code at a much smaller amount of polyfills. Differential loading will begin by adjusting at a fixed upper & lower limit.
Dynamic imports for lazy routes
Rather than custom string, lazy-loaded routes use standard dynamic import syntax. This is quite clear to say that both TypeScript & linters will be able to raise issues in case modules are misspelled. You must take care of syntax if you’re upgrading your app with ng upgrade command. You have to switch from this command
{ path: ‘/cart’, loadChildren: ‘./cart/cart.module#CartModule’ to { path: `/cart`, loadChildren: () => import(`./cart/cart.module`).then(m => m.CartModule) } for lazy-loaded import.
How to upgrade Angular 7 to 8 version
If you have already migrated from HttpClient & RxJS6, you can smoothly upgrade an app from Angular 7 to Angular 8 for constructive web app development. $ ng update @angular/cli @angular/core is a single command to run a process to upgrade over to Angular 8. However, Angular developers must ensure that they’re using Node.js version 12 to run an upgrade. Some issues related to the new syntax will also appear as Angular supports TypeScript 3.4.
Ending Notes
Still thinking whether to upgrade to Angular 8 or stay with version 7? Even though there are not so many changes the answer is absolutely yes as differential loading will speed up your app’s performance at ease. Angular developers are strongly suggested to go for Angular 8 update to upgrade their apps and make them Ivy ready. Although Ivy is available in a preview format, one must start analyzing the compatibility of the app and prepare for the future releases.
