The Good and Bad of Angular Development
By: Nelly Nelson
Tags: Angular, Angular Development, Development, JavaScript, Web Development

The Angular framework is here around for almost ten years. It is introduced and used by Google to build robust software products. This framework is developed by the same team that created the AngularJs framework. Angular is the most popular framework and ranks in the top five amongst other web app development frameworks. Angular is famous because it is equipped with robust components that help developers create readable, easy-to-use, and maintainable codes. To use this modern Angular framework, having knowledge of TypeScript is necessary.

Today, we will gather some necessary information about Angular and know its pros and cons that can help you in deciding whether to use this framework for your next project or not.

What is Angular?

Angular is one of the most popular typescript-based web application frameworks that belongs to the JavaScript ecosystem. According to a survey by Statista, it is the third most used web framework by 25.1 % of the developers worldwide in the year 2020.

Angular was introduced by Google in the year 2009 with an extended community of companies and people. It helps in developing cross-platform, single-page, and performant applications. Angular works easily with other libraries and allows the developers to create a unique app.

Angular Architecture

Angular is a well-known web framework written in type-safe JavaScript (TypeScript), which applies some of the functionalities and core libraries that can be imported by the application users. Here let us have a look at some of the top-level components of the Angular architecture.

1. Components

When we talk about Angular, it has many components that connect the document object model with the root components. These components are similar to the independent pieces of modules that can be injected into one another.

2. Modules

The developers can find information about the entire domain, specific capabilities, and workflow in the Angular modules. The root module in Angular acts as the entry point where everything is bootstrapped and orchestrated.

3. Directives, Data Binding, and Templates

Directives: The Angular template directives are responsible for program logic and are used with binding Angular keywords or markups.

Data Binding or Event Binding: Angular enables the support of two-way event binding where any changes made in the HTML dom or application code is reflected at both places.

Templates: They are an essential part of the Angular ecosystem that can help bind HTML in the front-end app with keywords.

4. Routing

The routing class handles all the URL directions, re-directions, and plumbing. Routing is an essential part of the architecture as it handles piping the URL to the view. Besides this, one of the best features is lazy loading. Here the router can load the module and don’t have to write while initializing.

Why Choose Angular?

Let’s see why you should select Angular for your project -

1. Google Support

Angular is a web app framework supported by Google. Having support from a supergiant company like Google, Angular is known as a trustworthy platform. The app developers can trust Angular more because of its community support and because of the fact that it is well-maintained.

2. Detailed Documentation

The Angular framework offers detailed documentation that helps the web app developers to find all the necessary information. Because of this, the developers can quickly solve any queries by finding the perfect solution. Besides this, if you are a newbie and want to learn about Angular, the documentation can be beneficial.

3. Component-based Architecture

The second version of Angular is converted from MVC architecture to component-based architecture. Because of this change, the app can be divided into functional components and independent logic. The developers can easily replace, decouple, or reuse these components in an app.

4. CLI

The command-line interface feature of Angular is the most popular amongst the app developers. It helps to automate the entire app development process by making app initialization and configuration.

5. Dependency Injection

The dependency injection feature in Angular means one object supplying the dependency to another. The dependency specifies how the components will connect and show how a change in one component can affect the other. In addition to this, the use of dependency injection can make the code more maintainable and reliable.

6. Ivy Renderer

Ivy Renderer is a feature available in Angular 6. It helps translate the app’s templates and components into a JavaScript code that will be showcased on the browser. It removes the unused code and makes it clear.

The Good: Angular Development Growth

1. Scalability

The Angular framework is easy to scale. This is because of the opinionated ways and design. You can design your app around pluggable modules with Angular, lazy loading, testable, a unified data flow, self-contained, and redux-like management. By following the Angular architecture, you can efficiently work with the bigger teams on a different codebase.

2. Tooling

Being one of the top frameworks, Angular offers a complete solution for unique, coherent features and different ways to do things. Compared to the two libraries Vue and React, Angular has all the major pieces like animation, HTTP client, forms handling, routing, etc. Besides this, Angular enables the developers to directly focus on the problems rather than analyze time and choose libraries.

3. TypeScript

If you know JavaScript, then working with TypeScript will be easy for you as TypeScript is known as a subset of JavaScript. TypeScript brings everything new to the versions of ECMAScript, like arrow functions, class syntax, etc.

4. Templates

With Angular, you can get templates that are enhanced versions of HTML with specific idioms. These templates present a slight learning curve, but it is usually cleaner than JavaScript markup and APIs when you look at the code.

5. Server Response

Angular is a framework that comes loaded with various CPU performance-enhancing features. Everything in Angular is written in a type-safe manner using TypeScript, making it faster than any other framework. Besides this, it also supports various toolkits and caching out of the box, which helps in improving the server-side performance.

6. MVVM Architecture

Model-View-ViewModel and Model View Controller architecture offers a super responsive and fast foundation for an application. As these are designing patterns, the app developers’ responsibility is to set up the codebase accordingly.

7. Angular Elements

Suppose your app development company is working with various projects simultaneously, which isn’t all in Angular, then with the 6th update of Angular. In that case, you can engineer other environments using the Angular elements. It doesn’t matter if the apps are built using React, Vuejs, or jQuery. You can use the Angular components.

The Bad: Angular Development Growth

1. Simplicity

Angular is easy to use, but it is not always that simple. It has lots of concepts, moving parts, and conventions to grasp. This makes time investment a significant thing for the developers if they want to create something more than a to-do app. It happens that even if the developers have experience in JavaScript/TypeScript, they have to invest considerable time to learn about everything that is going on with the framework.

Angular being bigger than Vue and React, it takes a longer time to load, and performance issues are observed, mostly on mobile devices.

2. Heavy Weighted Framework

There are many lightweight frameworks with different architectures in the market, like React and Vue. Being lightweight frameworks, they are not difficult to run a smooth application. On the other hand, it is a pretty bloated and heavyweight framework when we talk about Angular.

In the world of microservices, Angular lacks. This is because of its abstractions and features. Also, besides Angular, most of the frameworks follow the virtual dom concept, which helps them make significant changes in the views.

3. Migration

Porting jQuery/legacy js to the Angular style architecture is difficult, and this is why enterprises avoid choosing Angular for their projects. In addition to this, Angular has a very fast and iterative development lifecycle, resulting in new versions of Angular launching frequently. Therefore, app developers learn about new features often.

Besides this, the new releases can be painful for the app development companies as they have to upgrade their work, and some of them might not be backward compatible.

To Wrap Up With

Angular is one of the most used and popular frameworks amongst the app developing community as it enables them to create advanced projects. Angular is a framework that adds new elements to the projects that are built using different platforms. Some of the popular web applications built using Angular are Forbes, Delta, Microsoft Office Home, Google About, and more. It is clear that working with Angular for your project will be beneficial in many ways.