Angular is known as one of the best SPA (Single Page Application) development solutions, besides React and Vue.js. It was released almost 10 years ago and since then it has gone through countless tweaks. The first version of the framework was 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 created a framework for handling HTML crashes while taking ideas and best practices from other libraries that were somewhat different than what was done before. The approach to founding Angular 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 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, he attracted Google who understood the great potential of Angular that was created by his team. Thus, thanks to the sponsorship of a large company like Google, Angular became more popular.
Before Angular hit the market or in its early days, it was not that easy to manage the huge package size compared to other libraries and often some people noticed some performance issues in the framework as well. There were also many flaws in the framework, which makes AngularJS not a very successful framework. The template syntax in the Angular framework worked very well and was adopted by Vue.js. (v-if – ng-if, v-model – ng-model) while the chaotic digest loop system places limitations on its performance.
Some delays in AngularJS came up as a big motivation forcing him to rewrite the entire framework. Angular’s change detection system was unpredictable, so Google developers wanted 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 the HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and TypeScript code to JavaScript during build time, while moving trees removes extra imports for faster app startup and smaller footprint as well .
In Angular, the CLI was introduced which has the ability to start new projects, generate skeletons and also has the ability to create an application server that is why now it has become a great useful tool for developers. Except this, Angular also provides some useful mechanisms that deal with browser history. Thanks to these mechanisms, it is now very easy to manage 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 set to the default route. We can also control browser history through the 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 created primarily for debugging web applications. The extension is not compatible with later versions of Angular. Angular versions 1.2 and later are not compatible with Internet Explorer versions 6 or 7, while AngularJS versions 1.3 and later are compatible with the Internet Explorer 8 browser.
