Angular is known as one of the best SPA (single page app) development solutions besides React and Vue.js. It was released almost 10 years ago and has gone through countless tweaks since then. The first version of the framework became known as AngularJS which was released in the year 2009 and thus laid the foundation for today’s front-end application development.
AngularJS was founded by developer Misko Hevery when he started working on a specific side project and later formed AngularJS. Misko built a framework to handle HTML flaws while taking ideas and best practices from other libraries that were something else done previously. Angular’s foundation approach was a great implementation because its features made Misko extremely popular with other web developers.
AngularJS, which refers to the 1.x and 2.x versions of the framework, is known as Angular. During its early days, Angular was not only the framework, but it also offered some of the best practices and features that made it very popular very quickly. After becoming popular among other frameworks in a few months, it attracted Google who understood the great potential of Angular that was created by his team. Therefore, due to the sponsorship of a big company like Google, Angular became more popular.
Before Angular came to market or in its early days it was not so easy to manage the huge package size compared to other libraries and often some people noticed some performance issues in the framework as well. Many shortcomings were also found in the framework, which makes AngularJS not a very successful framework. The template syntax in the Angular framework worked great and was adopted by Vue.js. (v-if – ng-if, v-model – ng-model) while the chaotic summary loop system places limitations on its performance.
Some delays in AngularJS came up as a huge motivation forcing you to rewrite the entire framework. Angular’s change detection system was hit or miss due to Google developers wanting to rewrite the framework and therefore developers started using very powerful libraries. Angular developers were also introduced to some unique features like AoT (Ahead-of-Time) compilation, tree shaking and many others as well. Although AoT changes HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) and TypeScript code to JavaScript during its build time, while shaking trees removes additional imports for faster application startup and smaller footprint as well.
In Angular the CLI was introduced which has the ability to start the new projects, generate skeletons and also has the ability to build application servers, that is why now it has become a great useful tool for developers. Except for this, Angular also provides some useful mechanisms that take care of the browser history. Due to these mechanisms, it is now very easy to handle URL changes through direct user interaction or browser back / forward buttons. When entering an Angular application, there is an abstract route defined later that URLRouterProvider can be defined for the default route. We can also monitor browser history through HTML5 History API and Angular’s location service.
In AngularJS, the latest version of was released in June 2015. The previous version of AngularJS was 1.3.16 while the latest version of AngularJS is 1.4.0. AngularJS is one of the most popular JavaScript MVC (MVVM) Frameworks. Almost 6 years ago, the Angular team developed a plugin for the Google Chrome browser called Batarang, which was primarily created for debugging web applications. The extension is not backward compatible with Angular releases. Angular Versions 1.2 and later versions are not compatible with Internet Explorer versions 6 or 7, while AngularJS versions 1.3 and later are compatible with Internet Explorer 8 browser.