Getting Started with Angular

Learn what Angular is and the advantages of choosing it for development.

We'll cover the following

What is Angular?

Angular is a development platform that is written in the TypeScript language. It consists of smaller sub-systems, including a JavaScript framework, a command-line interface, a language service, and a rich collection of first-party libraries.

Angular enables developers to build scalable web applications with TypeScript, a strict syntactic superset of JavaScript. Developing with Angular does not require knowledge of JavaScript, but it is nice to have. We will learn more details about TypeScript later.

Note: We suggest relying first on the official Angular documentation and then on any other sources, because it is the most up-to-date source for Angular development.

History of Angular

Angular was created by a team internally at Google. The first version, 1.0, was released in 2010 and was called AngularJS. AngularJS was a JavaScript framework, and web applications built with it were written in JavaScript.

In 2016, the Angular team decided to make a revolutionary change in AngularJS. The team joined forces with the TypeScript team at Microsoft and introduced TypeScript into the framework. A vital consideration toward that decision was decorators, a powerful feature of the TypeScript language that Angular heavily uses. The next version of the framework, 2.0, was written in TypeScript and rebranded as Angular, with a different logo than AngularJS.

Note: In this course, we will cover Angular 15, which is the latest stable version of the Angular framework. AngularJS was terminated in 2022, and it is no longer supported and maintained by the Angular team.

Angular is based on the most modern web standards and supports all the evergreen browsers. It is compatible with the most major versions of all browsers. However, Chrome and Firefox only support the latest ones.

In the following section, we will learn about the benefits of choosing Angular for web development.

Why choose Angular?

The power of the Angular platform is based on the combination of the following characteristics:

  • The main pillars of the platform: cross-platform, incredible tooling, and easy onboarding

  • The usage of Angular worldwide

In the following sections, we will examine each characteristic in detail.

Cross-platform

Angular applications can run on different platforms: web, server, desktop, and mobile. Angular can run natively only on the web because it is a JavaScript framework. However, it is open-source and is backed by a vast and incredible community that enables the framework to run on the remaining three using the following integrations:

  • Angular universal: This renders Angular applications server-side.

  • Angular service worker: This enables Angular applications to run as Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) that are customizable and can be installed on a desktop environment.

  • Ionic framework: This allows us to build mobile applications using Angular.

The next pillar of the framework describes the tooling available in the Angular ecosystem.

Tooling

The Angular team has built two great tools that make Angular development easy and fun:

  • Angular CLI: This is a command-line interface that allows us to work with Angular projects from creation to deployment.

  • Angular DevTools: This is a browser extension that enables us to debug and profile Angular applications from the comfort of our browser.

The Angular CLI is the de facto solution for working with Angular applications. It allows the developer to focus on writing application code, eliminating the boilerplate of configuration tasks such as scaffolding, building, testing, and deploying an Angular application.

Onboarding

It is simple and easy for a web developer to start with Angular development because when we
install Angular, we also get a rich collection of first-party libraries out of the box, including:

  • Angular HTTP client: This is to communicate with a REST API endpoint over HTTP.

  • Angular forms: This is to create HTML forms for collecting input and data from users.

  • Angular router: This is to perform in-app navigations.

Note: A first-party library is a library that is provided by the Angular framework out of
the box, without the need to install it separately.

The preceding libraries are installed by default when we create a new Angular application using the Angular CLI. However, they are not used in our application unless we import them explicitly into our project.

Who uses Angular?

Many companies use Angular for their websites and web applications. Statistically, more than 2,500 projects inside Google use the Angular framework. Additionally, more than 1.5 million developers worldwide prefer Angular for web development.

The fact that Angular is already used internally at Google is a crucial factor for the reliability of the platform. Every new version of Angular is first thoroughly tested in those projects before becoming available to the public. The testing process helps the Angular team catch bugs early and delivers a top-quality platform to the rest of the developer community.