How Can Angular Help My Engineers?

TypeScript

Angular was one of the first platforms to fully utilize TypeScript. While there are ways to use ES5 with the Angular platform, the adoption of TypeScript from the start leads to a framework that fully utilizes all of the benefits.

By taking advantage of strong typing, better decorators, and a class extension oriented approach make Angular a dream to work with from within an IDE.

The community has caught on too, providing resources for avoiding errors, utilizing features properly, and even educating about existing features. Another often forgotten benefit is that Angular is a TypeScript-first framework means most (if not all) compatible libraries are TypeScript compatible as well.

RxJS and Async Handling

Asynchronous event handling has long been a plague on the land of JS. From callback hell to promise waterfalls, it quickly becomes a difficult problem to handle.

While async/await behavior has greatly improved this, the simplicity of that approach leaves a lot to be desired. RxJS, however, is a great solution to fix all of your event needs.

The management of events as streams within RxJS allows you to process, combine, and cache events with ease. While you can implement RxJS within React, the lack of first class support leaves you open to other event handling problems, which require further complexity, boilerplate, and problem solving.

Angular’s RxJS first approach means the vast majority of these complexities are handled for you. On top of that, while it takes lots of time and politics to get new features added to JS’s built-in async protocols, RxJS is always evolving, giving you constant access to the latest and greatest.

Form Management

Let’s be blunt: complex components, forms specifically, get real weird real fast in frameworks like React. This complexity quickly leads to readability issues, which over time will become rampant maintenance issues.

This isn’t as much of a problem in Angular, thanks to baked-in Forms API. This functionality makes it much easier to handle nested and dynamic forms, and the control value accessor opens that functionality up to any component you can dream up.

If you have a variety of inputs with a variety of states, validations (and convenient built-in validators), and UI complexities, there’s simply no better choice than Angular’s form management.

State Management

The world of state management is always evolving, and luckily our frameworks are evolving with it. With React, Redux is often a good choice to help balance state across components. Vue’s state management of choice is often Vuex. As you would expect, Angular has the popular NgRx library to help manage state in a similar fashion.

While the standardized Flow workflow is a great addition to Angular’s features, the addition of reactiveness on top makes it an extremely powerful tool. Implementation is relatively straightforward and it even provides deeper abilities like form driven state.

If the addition of another tool on top of the Angular stack is too much, utilization of out of the box RxJS subjects and Angular services can make for an incredibly powerful and extremely simple state management solution. There are answers for every problem.

Micro Frontends

With the proliferation of web components and React’s incredible reusability, it’s important to note where Angular stands with the next great iteration of the web: Micro Frontends. When it comes down to it, all you need is a good architecture and a well written Module Federation configuration.

While simplicity isn’t a key tenet of the Micro Frontends movement, a well configured Angular instance can be readable and usable in any proper architecture. If you're interested in learning more about our approach, this article explains how Bitovi implements micro frontend architecture.

Upgrading from Angular JS

If you’re here because you’re looking to upgrade - we get it. AngularJS to Angular is a huge jump, and it can definitely cause some questions about whether or not you should stay in the Angular ecosystem. A careful upgrade, and avoiding some of the common mistakes, can allow you to take full advantage of the capabilities of modern Angular.

If you're past version 2 and need to upgrade, the path forward is generally straightforward, community supported, and well documented. Occasionally there’s some deeper intricacies but overall, upgrading to get the latest of the Angular feature set is no more difficult than in other frameworks.

Bitovi helps support your upgrade with our expert team of Angular consultants. If you'd like to discuss what you need in an upgrade, sign up for a free consultation. 

Why Bitovi?

Bitovi's Angular experts combine decades worth of experience with constant training and learning on the latest and greatest technologies. We come to where you are, provide actionable ways to push your product forward, and can even help your team achieve those goals.