The 2018 angular conference (ng-conf 2018) took place on April 18–20th 2018 at Salt Lake City, UT. The conference featured a large number of sessions, workshops, and speakers from the Angular team and the Angular community.
ng-conf 2018 was live streamed and live transcripted for the home audience, to enjoy the same learning experiences as those of the actual attendees. Not to mention, the whole event was 80s themed, coinciding with the release of the movie Ready Player One which features a lot of 1980s pop-culture references.
We have compiled a list of popular announcements and sessions which were the highlights of this year’s conference.
Introducing RxJS6
Ben Lesh introduced version 6 of the ReactiveX library for JavaScript. RxJS is a library for reactive programming using Observables, that makes it easier to compose asynchronous or callback-based code. RxJS6 brings cleaner imports while having a smaller API, a backward compatibility package to update without changing your code, and automatic code migration for TypeScript.
- RxJS 6 Backward Compatibility: To make the migration path from RxJS 5 to RxJS 6, the RxJS team has released a sibling package called rxjs-compat. This package creates a compatibility layer between the APIs of v6 and v5.
- Automatic code migration: For TypeScript users, which cover the majority of Angular developers, RxJS introduces tslint, which offers a great deal of automated refactoring to make the transition from v5 to v6 even easier.
- Deprecations: A large no. of deprecations have been made. This includes Result selectors, Observable.if (replaced by iif() and Observable.throw replaced by throwError(). Apart from this, other deprecated methods include merge, concat, combineLatest, race, and zip.
StackBlitz + Angular: A Better Way to Build PWA’s
Albert Pai and Eric Simons conducted a session on building PWAs using StackBlitz with Angular. This suite of new developer tools makes building and debugging progressive web apps a lot easier. They run entirely in your browser with no setup or configuration required.
NgRx Sessions
A lot of sessions revolved around NgRx, the RxJS powered state management for Angular applications, inspired by Redux.
- Brandon Roberts talked about how to implement authentication with a reactive store by building an auth-based app with NgRx Store, Router, and Effects.
- Brandon Roberts and Mike Ryan presented a talk on Reactive Testing Strategies with NgRx. He talked about testing strategies such as unit testing presentation components, integration testing with smart components, testing observables, state management, and end-to-end tests, to make testing a reactive application easier and to simplify the testing triangle.
- Vitalii Bobrov talked about how NgRx Schematics is a huge time-saver. It will automate NgRx code generation and give you the ability to focus on application business logic.
- Mike Ryan presented a talk on Good Action Hygiene with NgRx and talked about how to write clean actions and avoid common anti-patterns.
- Jesse Sanders talked about how to handle complex forms using ngrx.
- David East and Todd Motto conducted a workshop on NgRx Selectors. They talked about multiple benefits of Selectors are easy to create and work well with teams. They allow you compute state from your store, which acts like a view model. Selectors are easily tested, memoized for performance, and compose-able for re-usability. By the end of this talk they promised to shake any store structure fears developers may have so that they can move forward boldly with selectors.
Firebase, Cloud Functions, and Machine Learning
Jason Dobry presented a workshop on how to use the Firebase SDK for Google Cloud Functions to improve an AngularFire Chat Web app. AngularFire is the officially supported AngularJS binding for Firebase. This binding lets you associate Firebase references with Angular models so that they will be transparently and immediately kept in sync with the database and with all other clients currently using your application.
Jason also talked about how to use Cloud Functions to send notifications to users of the Chat app, use the Google Cloud Vision API to process images, and use the Google Natural Language API to process chat messages.
The conference also featured workshops on the following
- How to hack an Angular app,
- Writing A Custom Angular Build
- Make your JS app search engine friendly,
- Building components with the Angular Component Dev Kit
- Strategies for Server Side Rendering Angular Apps
- Angular Elements in v6 and Beyond
- Hands-on Full-Stack development with Nx and Bazel,
- Using StackBlitz & Angular for Rapid App Prototyping
- Reusable Animations,
- Google’s serverless tools,
- VR Hero, and more.
You can have a look at the entire list of sessions and workshops on the ng-conf website.
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