2016 will be the year of AngularJS 2.0 and it’s going to be awesome.
AngularJS has been a known quantity to Packt for about 4 years, and has been around for 6. In the last 24 months, we’ve really seen it gain massive adoption amongst our user base. Conferences are held in its name. It will come as no surprise that it’s one of our best-selling topics. Thousands of apps have been deployed and created with it. People, do in fact, love it.
So the decision to rewrite the entire project seems odd.
A lot has been written about this already from developers who know their stuff. Some are for it, some against it, and some are a little more balanced. For a technically reasoned article, Rob Eisenberg’s blog about AngularJS 2.0 is the best of many I’ve read. For one that quotes Shakespeare, read on.
At Packt I’ve been the commissioning editor on a fair number of products. You may remember me from such hits as MEAN Web Development and Mastering D3.js. While I may not have the developer nous, creating a product is the same process whether it is a good framework or a good book. And part of this process understanding when you’ve got a good product, and when you had a good product that needs ripping up, and starting over.
What’s past is prologue
AngularJS’s design was emergent from increased adoption. It started life as a tool to aid designers throw up a quick online form. It was an internal tool at Google. They didn’t realise that every Joe Web Developer would be using it to power their client’s not-so-SEO-friendly bespoke applications. It’s the equivalent of what would happen if people started using this blog as a template for all future blogs. I’d enjoy it for the first few years, living the blogosphere high-life, then people would start moaning to me, and I would hate it. I’d have to start again, for my own health as much as for the health of the millions of bloggers who were using my formatting to try and contain their vastness.
So we’re agreed that they need to change things. Good.
Oh brave new world/That has such features in’t
Many frameworks change things whilst maintaining backwards compatibility. WordPress is a famous example of doing everything possible to avoid introducing breaking-changes at any major update. The result is, by now, a pretty bloated application that much like Angular, started out serving a very different purpose to how it now finds itself being deployed. It’s what gave rise to smaller, lighter-weight platforms like Ghost, designed purely for blogging.
AngularJS however is not an example of developers maintaining backwards compatibility. It takes pleasure in starting over. In fact, you can just about rip up your old Angular apps now. It’s for your own good.
By starting from a clean slate, the Angular team have the chance to design AngularJS in to what it should be rather than what it ended up being. It may not make sense to the developers who are using Angular 1.x at the moment, but to be frank Google doesn’t care. It cares about good products. It’s planning a product that will endeavour to remain relevant in to the future, rather than spending its time trying to patch up something that was a result of rushed 2010 thinking.
Part of this attempt at continued relevance is TypeScript. TypeScript extends the capabilities of ES6; moving to AngularJS 2.0 before ES7 is released means that it’s recommended that TypeScript is used to make the most of what Angular offers. This is a big move, but it’s an attempt at moving the capabilities forward. Doing something is always preferable to doing nothing.
The other headline act, and related to the ES6 features is the move to make Angular compatible with Web Components. Web Components will redefine what web development means, in time, and making sure that their framework is on hand to help deliver them safely to developers is again a smart product decision. The temporary pain of the rewrite will be rewarded by increased ease of use and longevity for the developers and clients who build and consume AngularJS applications.
There are a whole host more features; a move to mobile-first design, which I understand, and lots of technical and syntax improvements, which I don’t; increased performance, and plenty more too. Every decision is being made to make Angular a better product for everyone who uses it.
Gentle breath of yours my sails/Must fill, or else my project fails
AngularJS 2.0 has been a divisive figure in the web development world. I’ve been at Packt for three years and can’t remember a time when such a popular and well-used technology completely ripped up everything they had and started again. It will set a precedent in software that will shape the future, either way it ‘goes down’.
What we should focus on is that this wholesale change is designed to make the product better – not just now, but in to the future – and that decision should be applauded. It’s not unheard of for Google to stop/start/abandon high-profile projects (cough Google Glass cough), but they should be recognised nonetheless for their dedication in trying to make this a more accessible and useful platform long term.
Ultimately though, it will be the users who decide if they won or lost. The team are bringing a different project in the hope that people see its advantages, but no matter the intent a product is only useful if the consumers find it useful. Through our ‘gentle breath’, the Angular project will fly or fail. Let’s embrace it.
