What is Angular and AngularJS?- Why you Should use it?

Angular is one of the foremost popular frameworks used for building web applications with JavaScript. If you’re new to Angular, you’ll be confused about what Angular and AngularJS are and what are the differences between them. If that’s the case, then you’re within the right spot. Because that’s what we’ll be watching during this article.

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What is Angular and AngularJS?

Angular.js is the most popular and powerful javascript framework. It was developed in 2009 by Misko and Adam Abrons. Its library is written in Javascript. Licensed Under Apache and maintained by Google. It is mostly used in the SPA(Single Page Application) like Instagram, Gmail, Google Maps, Airbnb, Netflix, Pinterest, Paypal, and many more are using SPAs to provide a better user experience. It is an open-source platform, totally free and used by thousands of developers around the world

On the 20th of October 2010, Google released an open-source front-end web framework that supported JavaScript. The new framework was named AngularJS, and it quickly rose to popularity thanks to its ability to increase HTML through directives and build single-page web applications. However, as AngularJS aged, it couldn’t support the increasing demands of web developers anymore. Especially after the arrival of React and Vue, AngularJS faced tough competition.

Google decided to try to do an entire overhaul of AngularJS with version 2 and decided to modify it to Typescript, rather than JavaScript. TypeScript may be a Superset of ES6 that forms JavaScript. Google choose TypeScript to beat the pitfalls of JavaScript and introduce some features like static typing, which were in demand by developers at that point.

All AngularJS versions released after version 1 (AngularJS) are generalized as Angular. So which version you ought to learn and use in your projects will depend upon the features that your project requires.

What Is MVC Framework?

MVC stands for Model-View-Controller. It’s a kind of software architecture or design pattern that makes designing huge software programs easy. It makes the programming easy. The Model View Controller is an architecture pattern That Separates an application into three main logic components Model, View & Controller. It is traditionally used for desktop (GUIs) Graphical User Interface.

Nowadays MVC Framework is most popular for designing Web applications as well as Mobile Apps. MVC framework was first time introduced in 1987 in the Small talk programming language.

Features of MVC Framework:

• Easy & Frictionless testability (highly Testable ,extensible & Pluggable framework.
• Offers full control over your HTML as well as your URLs.

Advantages:

• Development of Application become faster.
• Easier to update the application.
• Easier to Debug as we have multi-levels written in the Application.
• Maintenance of the code is easy so that it can be extended and grown.
• Model components can be tested separately from the user.
• Easier support for a new type of clients
• Parallel development of the component parts is possible.
• It only uses a Front Controller pattern that processes a web application’s requests through a single controller.
• Test-driven development is available in this software.
• This solution is ideal for Web applications, which are supported by large teams of developers and web designers.
• Provides clean separation of concerns(SoC).
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Friendly.

Disadvantages:

• Hard to Understand the MVC framework.
• It must have Strict rules and regulations on Methods.
• This model is difficult to read, change, unit test, and reuse.
• MVC’s navigation is sometimes complex since it introduces new layers of abstraction which require users to adapt to the MVC decomposition criteria.
• There is no formal validation support.
• Inefficient data storage and increased complexity
• MVC is hard to use because of the modern user interface.
• There is a need for multiple programmers to carry out parallel programming.
• Knowledge of multiple technologies is necessary.
• There are a number of codes in the Controller that need to be maintained

Architecture

AngularJS uses the MVC model, which separates an application into three logical units called Model, View, and Controller. While the Model is liable for all data-related logic, View is liable for the UI logic of the appliance. The controller acts as an interface between the Model and consider. It receives user requests, processes business logic with the assistance of Model data, then interacts with View to render the ultimate output.

In contrast, Angular relies on Components and Directives, which are its building blocks. Directives provide the instructions necessary to rework the DOM (Document Object Model). This happens when Angular renders its templates, which are dynamic. Directives provide a way more efficient way of integrating dynamic behavior to web applications.

An Angular Component may be a directive-with-a-template; in other words, it’s a Directive extended with template-related features. So, Components are technically Directives. However, there also are other types, like structural, attribute, and Custom Directives.

Angular CLI

One of the key components that were added to Angular is that the Angular CLI, which has greatly helped speed up the event process. you’ll use it for creating new projects, fixing boilerplates, building components, and far more. These are a number of the foremost commonly used Angular commands for creating a replacement project, generating a component or service, and starting a test server:

ng- new my-project

Expression Syntax

AngularJS requires developers to memorize many predefined commands to perform actions like binding. For instance, ng-model is often want to create a two-way binding, while ng-bind is often used for its one-way counterpart.

In Angular, these actions are simplified. The ngModel command may be a single command used for these purposes. One-way and two-way event binding is often performed with “()” and “[()]” respectively. Property binding is often done using “[ ]”.

Extra Features:

• Mobile Support

The prevalence of mobile applications amplified the lack of AngularJS to support Mobile app development. This changed with Angular as native app support was included. In fact, the Angular website boldly states “One framework. Mobile and desktop.” This shows the importance given to mobile development within the later versions of Angular.

• Routing

Routing is a crucial feature that permits navigating to pages with varying content supported by the URL. this is often especially important for Single Page Applications (SPA). AngularJS came with built-in routing, however, Angular simplified the code required to take care of complex routing and introduced features like Router Lifecycle Events and support for ParamMap.

• Improved Testing

Testing and writing unit tests are generally difficult in Angular, regardless of the version. the rationale for this is often that unit tests require a DOM to be executed. the answer to the present to choose third-party testing tools like Protractor, which is an end-to-end testing tool. However, the resulting tests become more like UI tests or integration tests, and these are slower to execute and harder to take care of.

In contrast, Angular features a separate rendering layer, and components are independent. These improvements end in unit tests being executed much faster and having better maintainability.

• Speed

Unidirectional data flow and hierarchical dependency injection have uplifted the performance of Angular. In contrast, AngularJS uses two-way binding, which is popular among web developers for creating smaller applications. But as applications increase in size and complexity, two-way binding can cause infinite checking, which greatly affects the application’s performance.

• Dependency Injection

AngularJS was already quite innovative with its approach for dependency injection when building modular applications. However, there have been some issues that would not be fixed without an entire code restructuring.

1. One such case which becomes problematic when building relatively complex applications is that AngularJS features a global pool of objects per application. This suggests that developers aren’t ready to load multiple instances of components like services.
2. If they are doing, the next instances would override the initial one.
3. The situation is analogous for modules with an equivalent name. AngularJS would silently override them. Both of those concepts become useful during a few cases, like replacing modules with mock modules for testing but end in many other restrictions.
4. Angular JS also provides some ways of injecting dependencies like in link function by position, within the directive definition by name, and within the controller function by name. While these methods provide more flexibility, they also end in a steeper learning curve.
5. Angular resolves these problems and simplifies dependency injection by unifying it into one mechanism. Dependencies are injected within the constructor. Another benefit is that these dependencies are hierarchical. So multiple dependencies are often defined at different points of the component tree. If a dependency isn’t defined, the component will ask its parent.

• Server-Side Rendering

1. One of the few disadvantages of Single Page Applications (SPA) is that the lack of support for SEO thanks to the content being rendered on the client-side dynamically. Angular solves this by providing the power to render content at the server-side and serve static HTML content to the client-side.
2. Server-side rendering greatly benefits SEO friendliness. program crawlers love static content, mainly because they don’t execute JavaScript. The Google crawlers are said to be ready to execute JavaScript as of 2018, however, it’s always better to serve pre-rendered static content considering the opposite SEs. Additionally, it also can benefit applications by increasing performance. Faster loading pages are great for SEO.

• Support for Shadow DOM

Shadow DOM may be a browser mechanism that permits creating components that look native. for instance, a custom select (drop-down) component. having the ability to support the Shadow DOM may be a major advantage of Angular.

However, just some browsers like Chrome have implemented it. Angular allows emulating this feature on other browsers by prefixing the CSS inside components on the fly. It also allows applications to run in default mode, which suggests that the Shadow DOM isn’t active.

Angular.js was introduced by Google in 2010.

Most Popular reasons to choose Angular as your framework

• Easy to use: Angular is a Javascript framework with a real DOM that is most suitable for single-page applications where content is updated periodically. Also, developers made it much easier to develop and test applications by providing frameworks for MVC (Model-View-Controller) and MVVM (Model-View-View_Model) client-side architectures.
• Excellent support from Google: Ever since Angular launched in 2010, the Google team has developed and maintained regular updates to the framework every six months. According to a Medium report, Angular is used by many leading companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Upwork, Telegram, Autodesk, and Freelance.
• Two-way data binding: Angular uses the two-way data binding process. All changes can be easily reverted through the template, which is a safe, quick, and intuitive method. It was great to bind forms and other UIs to JavaScript templates.
• Reusable components: The most common use of Angular is to bind data to a set of HTML elements. Angular directives provide a quick and easy way to create HTML+CSS components. This was the first JavaScript framework that became extremely popular compared to many others before it. Modular components have been used in server-side architectures for many years.
• Speed: Since it is the platform that enables everything from developing a project to optimizing code, the sheer scope of Angular makes it the greatest challenge for deployment. Although Angular provides a variety of features, A single command may be used by developers to deploy an integrated bundled package on any static host.
• Modularity: Angular manages code into buckets, whether they are directives, pipes, components, or services. For those familiar with the Angular platform, modules are buckets. Modules simplify the organization of application code by dividing it into reusable chunks and functions. Lazy loading of modules can help with on-demand application feature loading.
• Easy to test: The factor so many web developers like Angular is that testing is quick. You can control just the framework’s parts you need and then see how they behave before they are published.
• Securing data: When it comes to new technological developments or company development, security is always top of mind. Data security in the Angular context has been given priority in the organization’s data distribution.
• Compatibility: Websites today must be mobile-friendly. Users of any device should be able to access the website as if it were viewed on their mobile. Angular makes your mobile web app instantly compatible with an app so that Google gives your website a higher ranking for mobile playback on a mobile device.
• Easy to Integrate: The integrated features of Angular allow easy distribution of third-party features. For example, Angular is already pre-built with Ionic, Telerik’s KendoUI, Wijmo, etc.
• Code consistency: Most web developers strive to write simple but powerful codes. MVC (Model View Controller) architecture is supported by Angular. The developer must split the code to fit in an MVC framework, and the rest is handled by Angular.
• Dependency injection: Angular is famous for enabling dependency injection in the front-end development world. In business applications, dependency injection was famous for a long time. Perhaps this is why JavaScript did not catch up to it. Even so, the dependency has also proved its worth. People who have not used dependency injection before should find Angular-enabled dependency injection easy to use.

Advantages and drawbacks :

Advantages of Angular over AngularJS

• Angular is claimed to be a minimum of five times faster thanks to improvements in its algorithm for data binding and component-based architecture.
• Components are reusable thanks to their independent and self-sufficient nature.
• Unit tests are much faster thanks to independent components and a separate rendering layer.
• Applications are compatible with both web and mobile environments.
• Supports server-side rendering of applications improving syncing content and benefitting SEO.
• Angular isn’t hooked into JavaScript being enabled at the client-side.
• Further, Angular Supports lazy loading, making applications more efficient by loading only components that are required.
• TypeScript helps to make better applications with cleaner code and better navigation.
• the supply of a CLI reduces the quantity of code required to make projects and components.
• Regular updates and support, in contrast to AngularJS.

Disadvantages of Angular over AngularJS

• it’s a steeper learning curve thanks to the utilization of TypeScript, which may be a statically typed language.
• thanks to Angular being an entire rewrite, all legacy applications got to be migrated through a time-consuming process.
• Managing components are usually very complex as each component requires many files.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we will state that AngularJS is best for smaller web applications and Angular for giant enterprise-like ones. you’ll get to try both of those frameworks before deciding which one is best for your particular application. Being conversant in both is a plus needless to say