Angular News: Angular’s SDK, Best Practices for Upgrading, Material Design, & Angular Directives
Published: 2019-07-11 19:42:05

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz on Angular’s SDK (a new version of the CLI), the never ending AngularJS to Angular upgrade question, Angular Material’s progress, and how to think of Angular’s directives in a way that may be more useful to your application development.

In these videos, we cover the latest Angular news with Hans Larsen ([@hanslatwork](https://twitter.com/hanslatwork))and Pete Bacon Darwin ([@petebd](https://twitter.com/petebd)) from the Angular Core Team, Elad Bezalel ([@elad_bezalel](https://twitter.com/elad_bezalel)) from the Angular Material Core team, Mike Brocchi ([@Brocco](https://twitter.com/brocco))from the Angular-CLI Core Team, and Justin Searls ([@searls](https://twitter.com/searls)), a JavaScript developer and speaker.

![](https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2400/1*Np3HTOfbc3vwtN2if5w5Ng.png)

### **Angular CLI, SDK, and Angular 4.0**

*Hans Larsen Reveals Upcoming Angular Products and Discusses SDK*

As a member of the core angular team, Hans has been working on SDK — the next version of CLI. He says his work involves helping developers with efficiency, by allowing them to manage their apps and projects, even before making an appearance to the browser. He’s also looking to make improvements to better the interface.

Hans further explains that individuals who are used to the current CLI, will be able to use the new version with ease. Default features will remain the same, and the upgrade path will be straightforward, made to support Angular 4.0. Having said that, SDK will be entirely redesigned from the ground up as a blueprint library. All very exciting news for the Angular community.

{% youtube RA8CB5FnHXY %}

### **Angular, AngularJS, and Ng-upgrade**

*Pete Bacon Darwin, Angular Core Team on The Best Way to Upgrade Your AngularJS Applications*

As a contributor who is still working on one of the biggest JavaScript frameworks, he talks about how to slow down the development of AngularJS in order to allow migration towards Angular. The parts of AngularJS that many people came to love still exist in Angular, which is more reason to help push developers towards Angular.

Easy upgrade can be accomplished with ngUpgrade, which allows angular and angularjs to run at the same time. This way, developers can continue to keep uptime for their clients while moving their code one part at a time. NgUpgrade is one of many potential solutions for the switch over to Angular.

Going back to when Angular was introduced, Pete talks about whether there was a better way to prepare the community for the migration. From his point of view, due to the existing architecture of Angularjs, there wasn’t anything that could’ve been done differently, as the Angular now is much more advanced in comparison.

The interview ends with Pete describing the Angular community and different frameworks coming together and converging ideas. He believes comparing and discussing ideas helps immensely with solutions as JavaScript and modern web in general continues to evolve.

{% youtube LppuYau10cc %}

### **Angular Material + Angular Material 2**

*Elad Bezalel, Angular Material Core Team: Being on The Angular Material Team*

Elad Bezalel is a part of the Angular Material Team and is currently working on Material 2 components and features. He walks us through how he became a part of the team and what intrigued him the most about Material. Elad is very confident about this project and encourages developers to use it as an aid with their designing. He is still working on improvements and creating more components, but seeing as Material 2 is in its beta stage, it is ready for anyone who want to use it.

{% youtube r3cS0T-ugj0 %}

### **Angular Directives**

*Mike Brocchi and His Thoughts on Angular Directives*

Mike describes becoming a member of the Angular-CLI Core team and contributing to the angular community to be more involved. In this interview, he talks about directives in detail, starting with the fact that they are underrated and should be promoted. He hopes in the future, people will be more aware of how to use directives effectively. He explains how it’s still a key part of Angular, even beyond Angularjs.

With directives, developers can add behaviours to their applications without having to separate components or add logic into their component.This could be done for many situations.

Mike also discusses when not to use a directive and expands a little on host binding and host listening. He then gives a breakdown of what else directives can accomplish, such as improving accessibility or being used to access templates from existing components. Mike also describes the differences between different types of directives.

{% youtube 8_rtU5Lcd6U %}

### **Angular Community + Open Sourcing Projects**

*Overcoming the Challenges of being a Developer: Justin Searls Shares his Experience*

Justin discusses what it’s like to learn Angular (coming from ember) and how frameworks have evolved, becoming more intense and “robust”. Although this is a good thing, he mentions it being important for there to be room for inventiveness, as this is why he chose to explore javascript in the first place. In his words “we need to make space for creativity and divergence instead of being on a unilateral path to solving applications”. This can easily be done with tools such as babel, which allows developers to experiment with different language features.

Justin elaborates on the non-technical side of being a developer. He talks about the feelings of frustration and upset, lack of motivation, and other barriers that come with being a developer. He then discusses how starting small, creative projects and open sourcing ideas can help channel these negative emotions, and turn them into something positive and applicable, as opposed to solely unbearable. He encourages developers to present their ideas even when they’re uncertain of the outcome, and gives tips on how to gain recognition in an effective and modest manner. All in all, Justin strives to provide a model for the industry, to normalize talking about weaknesses and shortcomings, no matter who you are, where you’re from, or what background you have as a developer.

{% youtube NwsPydCF-9A %}

The Angular team has been consistently releasing new updates to the framework. You can learn more about the Angular framework at [https://angular.io/](https://angular.io/).

*This article was co-written by *[Trinh Kien](https://twitter.com/heyyyitstk)* and *[Tracy Lee](https://twitter.com/ladyleet)

*Need JavaScript consulting, mentoring, or training help? Check out our list of services at [This Dot Labs](https://thisdot.co).*