In recent years, Angular has been recognized as the number one framework for front end development. A report released by CloudAcademy reveals that Angular is maintaining its lead in enterprises. Angular is prevalent incorporate use and is mentioned 59% of times when you search for full stack developer job posts. Another conclusion drawn from the report is that larger companies are looking for professionals with thorough knowledge of Angular.
What is Angular?
The tagline of Angular says ‘one framework. Mobile and desktop.’ This clearly implies that Angular is a framework that is used to develop mobile, web and desktop applications. To be more precise, Angular is a Javascript framework and is used by developers for building desktop, and mobile apps. It is led by Google and a community of corporations and individuals.
Angular serves as a platform for building applications with the web easily. It combines declarative templates, end to end tools, dependency and best features to solve challenges while developing the apps. The most important feature of Angular is that it functions perfectly with other libraries and is fully extensible.
TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript, is used in the development of Angular applications, along with HTML, CSS, etc. The code that is written in TypeScript is then compiled to JavaScript and is provided to the browser. For the development of web applications, Angular is considered as one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks.
The three popular versions of Angular that are launched till date are:
- Angular JS or Angular 1
- Angular 2
- Angular 4.
AngularJS is entirely different from Angular 2, but there are similarities in Angular 2 and Angular 4. One good thing is that a code written in Angular 2 will execute perfectly on Angular 4; in other words, Angular 4 has backward compatibility with Angular 2. Due to some issues in internal modules, Angular 3 was not released.
Also Read: How to become an Angular Developer?
Advantages of Learning Angular
There are various advantages to learning Angular. Some of them are mentioned below:
- Coding Reduced
Every developer wishes to write code that is short and at the same time effective, that can be written with the least possible effort and leveraging the functionality too. To accomplish this, Angular supports MVC or Model View Controller architecture. This implies that the developer needs to split their code so as to fit into MVC architecture, and the rest is the work of Angular. You are not required to write the MVC pipeline.
- Single Page Applications are supported by Angular
A web application that loads a single HTML page is known as Single Page Application. After loading the single HTML page, it is updated dynamically as per the interaction of the user with the web application. SPAs or Single Page Applications are capable of communicating with the back-end developers without the need of refreshing the full web page, in order to load data in the application. SPAs are capable of providing better user experience in browsing by reducing the time taken for loading pages, hence you don’t need to wait for long for a full page to reload.
- Declarative User Interface
The most important feature of Angular is that it uses HTML. HTML is the best option when it is required to define an application’s user interface. HTML is better than JavaScript because it is less complex along with being intuitive and declarative.
In the declarative interface, the presentational logic is separated from imperative logic. This implies that you don’t need to care about the program flow and the sequence of components on the web page. You just need to define the layout of the page, define what data is being bound and where is it being bound. Angular will do the rest, as it is done with coding.
- Modularity
In Angular, the code you write is organized into “buckets”, and these buckets are referred to as ‘modules’ in Angular. The application’s code is organized and is divided into reusable modules. These modules related components, pipes, directives, and services that are grouped together. To create an entire application, these modules can be combined with one another.
There are several benefits to using modules. The application created through this method can perform lazy-loading. This means that one or more application features can be loaded if required. You can increase the efficiency of your application if you use a lazy-loading feature wisely.
Enterprise applications, these days, are growing large, making modularity crucial. Dividing the labor across multiple teams becomes challenging with the increased size of these apps. These challenges can be problematic when it comes to collaboration. But if you use modules, the code can be kept organized and therefore labor is divided easily and properly, along with maintaining the consistency of the code.
- Ease of Integration
There are various platforms that have Angular already built into them, such as Telerik’s Kendo UI, Ionic, Wijmo, etc. This makes the integration of third-party features easy. You can use any of these frameworks in order to integrate some high-quality user interface components.
- Angular is a cross-platform framework
The most important feature of Angular is its cross-platform versatility. It lets you accommodate any of the required app types. The following are the types of applications that you can develop, using Angular.
- Web Applications.
You can use Angular for developing web applications. Moreover, Angular 5 and further versions allow you to create progressive web applications. Progressive applications are the ones that have high performance and can work offline too.
- Native Mobile Applications.
Smartphone apps that are written in specific coding languages such as Java (for Android) and Objective C (for iOS) are referred to as native mobile applications. Angular can also be used for creating native mobile applications.
- Desktop Applications.
You can use Angular to create desktop installed applications for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
The popular websites that are built using Angular are:
- PayPal
- Netflix.
- Lego
- Freelancer
- YouTube for PS3
- JetBlue
- Weather
- Upwork
- The Guardian
Final Words
With so many advantages of using Angular including good career options and salary prospects, developers can benefit a lot by learning Angular. You can take up an online Angular Certification course that lets you learn Angular to master front-end development. They usually provide you the option of self-paced learning or instructor-led training. So why not get the best-in-class skills and advance your career!
