Why You Should Upgrade AngularJS to Angular For Your Web Apps

If you are considering whether you should upgrade AngularJS to Angular for your web applications, the answer is yes and now is the time to take the leap.

There is no doubt that AngularJS will always be etched in the history of software development as the first JavaScript framework to have facilitated the development of interactive websites. With its launch in the year 2010, AngularJS became a favorite amongst the web app developers almost immediately and it paved the way for a new era of single-page applications with high responsiveness.

However, things changed pretty quickly and soon the same developers that used to be AngularJS fans realized that it had many shortcomings in terms of performance and scaling up the web apps.

Enter Angular 2.

The development team at Google rewrote the code of AngularJS from scratch and presented the world with a better, more efficient front end JavaScript framework in the year 2016. They named it Angular 2.Since then, the Angular team never became complacent and has consistently released more efficient versions of Angular regularly. So far, Angular has released seven versions with non-breaking changes with more advanced features with each version.

The latest version of Angular is Angular 9. You can check out the remarkable features of Angular 9 here.

AngularJS vs Angular: Should You Upgrade AngularJS to Angular?

The AngularJS vs Angular debate has been going on for a while now. The reasons why many developers have still stuck to AngularJS are many.

Some of them are skeptical about migrating from AngularJS to Angular because of the costs and efforts associated with the long-dreaded process. Some of them have resisted the urge to upgrade to Angular due to many migration misconceptions. Many developers still believe that AngularJS is far better than Angular so their apps are still running using the AngularJS framework.

In order to help you decide whether you should upgrade AngularJS to Angular for your web application, we have listed down the key differences between the two frameworks

AngularJS vs Angular: Key Differences

Architecture

The AngularJS framework works on the traditional Model View Controller (MVC) architecture. The controller in this MVC structure represents how your AngularJS app will respond to user interactions whereas the presentation layer and the UI of the app are represented in the View part. The Model in AngularJS represents your data in an abstract form.

Angular has a modern components based architecture wherein you can isolate various pieces of the app’s functionality into individual components. These components are simply directives that have their own predefined templates. Angular follows a strict hierarchy in its component-based architecture making the components more independent.

Language

For developing AngularJS apps, you write the code using the JavaScript language. For Angular 2 and higher versions, you can write the code using TypeScript.

JavaScript in AngularJS supports dynamic typing but you can write static code in the Angular framework using TypeScript. Static type helps you catch bugs and errors in real-time leading to fewer run time errors. Thus, TypeScript is an efficient alternative to JavaScript language that made it difficult to use AngularJS for large applications.

If you don’t want to spend time on learning TypeScript, all Angular versions also enable you to write the code using JavaScript.

Expression Syntax

While binding an event or a property in AngularJS, you must know and remember the exact ng directive for desired results. However, in Angular, you can easily bind an event using () and a property using []. Thus, the Angular framework is more intuitive in terms of data binding than the AngularJS framework.

Dependency Injection

With dependency injection, you can share common functionalities across many different components. Both AngularJS and Angular facilitate dependency injection but they do so in vastly different ways.

While developing an app with AngularJS, you need to inject the various controller functions, link functions, and directive definitions. On the other hand, Angular applies a hierarchical dependency injection using constructive functions, declarations, and providers to manage dependencies.

Mobile Support

Developing web apps with AngularJS does not come with mobile support. However, considering the demands in this mobile-centric world, all the Angular 2+ versions provide mobile support for the optimum efficiency of the web apps.

Advantages of Angular Over AngularJS

For a long time, AngularJS enjoyed unmatched popularity in the world of front end development. However, with the advent of Angular 2 and its subsequent releases, AngularJS started becoming outdated.

Considering how even the biggest of the brands have built their web apps with Angular, it is common knowledge that Angular is one of the most popular choices as a front end javascript framework.

If you are doubtful whether you should upgrade AngularJS to Angular for your web app, consider the following major advantages that Angular has over AngularJS:

Reusable Components in Angular

In comparison to AngularJS, the components in Angular framework are much more independent and self-sufficient. This makes the components highly reusable. You can use one component across all the parts of the app that have the same functionality. Because of the reusability of components in Angular, you can save a lot of time while developing web apps, especially large scale applications.

Easier App Maintenance in Angular

Components in Angular are also very loosely coupled. Changes in one component don’t significantly affect the performance or functionality of the other components. These self-sufficient and independent components in Angular are easier to scale up or replace. Because of this, app maintenance in Angular is much easier than maintenance in AngularJS.

Lazy Loading in Angular

Owing to its modular structure, Angular optimizes the web apps with lazy loading. This means that the users can load multiple features of the Angular app at the same time but on demand. As a developer, lazy loading enables you to load app components asynchronously and you can ensure that any part of the code is imported only when the user wants to use that particular feature. Thus, lazy loading boosts the overall performance of the app developed with Angular.

Server-Side Rendering in Angular

AngularJS supports client-side rendering whereas Angular facilitates server-side rendering with Angular Universal.

When you develop an AngularJS web app with client-side rendering, you run a risk of increasing the load time of your application. This is because the apps with client-side rendering wait until all the JavaScript is loaded and executed before it displays the app pages to the users.

In contrast to that, when you build a web app with Angular, the server-side rendering of Angular displays the web app page on the browser even when the system hasn't loaded all the JavaScript.

Even though server-side apps become interactive only after the entire code is loaded, the HTML page which the users can see during the app load time greatly reduces the bounce rate on your web app and thus, contributes to improved SEO rankings of your web app compared to AngularJS apps.

Ivy Renderer in Angular

Ivy, a rendering pipeline and view engine in Angular, offers two strong advantages over AngularJS – faster compilation and faster run time.

It works with the locality principle. It only compiles one file at a time. Moreover, while generating the output, Ivy renderer in Angular focuses on only a component and its template, not its dependencies. Thus, code compilation in Angular is much faster compared to AngularJS.

Another advantage of Ivy renderer is its tree shaking technique. Ivy renderer in Angular enables the app to focus only on the code that it’s using at a time by eliminating the portions of the code that are lying idle. This makes your Angular apps extremely lightweight with smaller bundle sizes.

Command Line Interface in Angular

A major drawback of AngularJS is that it doesn’t have what all the subsequent versions of Angular have – Angular CLI.

Angular CLI is a command-line interface that you can use to build components and directives in Angular web apps without writing or copying chunks of boilerplate codes.

Angular CLI simplifies the whole development process using quick, easy commands while also automating app initialization and configuration. These simple commands make it easy for you to add and test features to your web apps with minimal efforts. This is because you don’t have to spend time finding the right folder and module to import those features. Angular CLI will do that for you.

Faster Performance

The main feature of AngularJS that made it popular has also become the reason why developers choose to abandon it. Yes, we are talking about its two-way data binding feature. To ensure efficient two-way data binding, AngularJS has to constantly compare the variables with their preceding values for improved performance.  It does so using a digest cycle which is unpredictable and random. Thus, as the application scales up, these digest cycles become inevitably longer. Due to this, the performance of the app slows down.

This is not the case in Angular 2+ versions. Web apps developed with Angular consist of a flux architecture that uses unidirectional data flow for change detection. Thus, Angular apps are much faster in terms of performance as compared to applications developed with AngularJS.

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Should I Use Angular or AngularJS?

If you are considering building a web app from scratch, Angular is certainly a better choice because of its super useful features like TypeScript, component-based architecture and server-side rendering. If you are already managing a web app built with AngularJS and are considering whether you should upgrade from AngularJS to Angular, we would like to reiterate: the answer is yes and now is the time to take the leap.

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We have expertise in the latest technologies including angular, react native, iOs, Android and more. Third Rock Techkno has developed smart, scalable and innovative solutions for clients across a host of industries.

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