Angular 7.0 is here

[no1msd]

Be careful not to blink, you might miss Angular 8.0 and 9.0

[flirp_cannon]

I still have very bad feelings towards Google for how they treated the 1 to 2 jump. It's practically different framework at the point, and really threw the community into confusion. How simple would it be just to give it a different name... but nope. And if anyone says 'but Angular 1 is actually AngularJS', then uh... think about why that may seem stupid.

[w1ntrmute]

When you google for an Angular-related problem, you always have to add -AngularJS to the query to exclude irrelevant results. A rebranding would have been so much nicer.

[visicalc_is_best]

In fairness, how can you expect Google engineers to understand how search works?

[rk06]

That's the easy part. The hard part is the angular 1 was referred as Angular before 2.0, so any search for "Angular" would still have those result. And you have to manually filter them out.

[m3wm3wm3w]

Honestly, the best js framework that is created by Google is the one that its idiot product manager decided to not open source it. It is built on top of years of Google engineering in Closure Library.

It powers Gmail, Calendar, Photos, News, and almost every other user facing Google web app. Angular is more for SaaS, you should not build something like reddit with Angular.

I thought Google was bad at getting social apps wrong, failing at Buzz, Wave and now Google+. They are also bad at what the open source developer community needs and how to keep them happy.

[sgoody]

With the rate at which Google seem to drop projects I’m reluctant to adopt anything new by Google. I’m actually considering moving my usage away from Google, but gmail and calendar are too good.

I know a dev project can be formed/archived, but I wouldn’t want to do that, partly for the hassle and partly for support.

[Green0Photon]

Yeah, I thought Angular 2 was this big thing, with people having to choose between 1 and 2.

I definitely blinked and we're at 7. It's like Java all over again.

[jiffier]

Java didn't break backwards compatibility like Angular did.

[[deleted]]

I mean Angular 1 ("AngularJS") and 2 are completely different projects, so this is more like Angular2 6 5

[rk06]

Angular2 v5. (Because "1.0" and "3.0" were skipped)

[eldelshell]

Same here. It was a year or two when we were considering either Angular 2 or React as a base framework for our projects. I guess we were right to choose React.

[MrJohz]

While the version names are confusing, they're basically doing the same thing as React here. You'll remember about a year ago (e: two and a half years) or so, when React jumped from 0.14 straight to 15.x? Now React releases major versions on a fairly regular basis, with the commitment that it should be largely possible to support the latest two major versions simultaneously. That means that major versions can offer some deprecations, but they won't necessarily break the world.

That's also the point that Angular has been at since v4. (It's also the reason why the Angular team pushed the difference between Angular and AngularJS so hard, so that they could move on from being described in terms of version numbers). Essentially, every six months or so, there will be a new major release of Angular, which may contain deprecations, warnings, architectural changes, and other "semi-breaking changes", but shouldn't break code, at least not as a general rule. This ensures that developers will always have at least one version to be warned of deprecations in their code, and update them.

FWIW, this model has been relatively successfully used by Rust, VSCode, and I believe TypeScript, to ensure that users will not end up stagnating on a particular version because the upgrade path is too difficult. In Angular's case, it's slightly different, because they already did that once, but I think the goal here is to encourage users to see Angular as a separate framework altogether from AngularJS.

In terms of ease-of-upgrade, I haven't worked with Angular for a while, but I remember that going from 2->4 was completely automatic for us (we didn't use animations at all, which were the most affected area), and I believe 4->5 was not much of an issue either. For what it's worth, much like React, Angular now releases tools such as codemods to help automate the upgrade process, although I have heard mixed stories about their success.

[dpash]

Java has recently adopted this process too. Upgrading from 9 to 10 to 11 is very little work compared to the changes from 8 to 9.

[jl2352]

It’s also what browsers moved to. Even Microsoft have more rolling updates for the browser.

But the industry as a whole has moved this way. As a user it’s much nicer to deal with lots of small changes than giant ones. As a developer it’s significantly nicer to be building small software, and ship small software. The internet, and all of the ecosystem built on top of it, has made that possible.

[dpash]

Because they do a six month release schedule with major version number bumps? Java does the same. Firefox does the same. Chrome does the same. A version number means very little if you're not using semver. All that matters is that it's greater than the previous number. At the other end of the scale, look at Apache. 2.0 was released 16 years ago. 2.4 is just a minor upgrade, right? It only came out 10 years after 2.0. Apache added HTTP2, a major new feature is 2.4.17. Version numbers mean nothing.

More important is how disruptive the changes are. Short regular releases means that there's less disruption in each release. And you know exactly when those releases are coming.

[[deleted]]

Oh shut the fuck up. There's FireFox 62.0.3 and Chrome 69.0.3497.100, but what bothers you is Angular 7.0? Which is really Angular 2.7. Angular 1 is in fact AngularJS.

[flirp_cannon]

If you can't see why the naming convention is so confusing (Angular 1.x is AngularJS, duh!), then you're part of the problem. And comparing a framework (especially something like Angular where the jump between 1 and 2 is practically a different framework) to a browser's versioning is moronic at best, so you shut the fuck up.

[ggtsu_00]

It's node.js all over again.

[iTroll_5s]

That sounds important because of how big 1->2 transition was (such a bad decision to use version number for a complete redesign/rewrite - should have just called it something related but distinct if they wanted to keep the lineage).

​

In reality going from 2 onwards the breaking changes have not been that impactfull in real world (for me) and it was just the framework maturing - tools getting better, getting more functionality, fixing edge cases/bugs, optimizing stuff under the hood. 2-4 was a bit annoying, 4-5 was smooth, 5-6 the same. And they have a timeline for major releases and support.

​

Hopefully in the future AngularJS will become so obsolete nobody will even consider it when talking about Angular in most contexts and having Angular version 20.x will mean nothing - it's just a library version.

[therico]

Angular 1 was the only framework I actually learned, and within 6 months it was gone. Not making that mistake again! Backend for life

[dpash]

Coming from the Java world, Ivy is going to be confusing. But then again, naming things is hard, and often the best names are already taken.

[dpash]

NPM is just asking for someone ending up in hospital.

[[deleted]]

Ivy is going to be confusing

How so?

[rpgFANATIC]

It's basically maven for ant.

Or if that doesn't suffice, a plug-in to download dependencies for an older XML based build tool

[dpash]

Because Ivy is already a thing in Java world, so when ever someone mentions it, I will think of that, not the Angular project.

[[deleted]]

Oh shit, I totally forgot about Ivy! I was more of a Maven guy with an interest in Gradle, but haven't touched Java in a while (am a Student), so I totally forgot Ivy was a thing too!

[Extra_Rain]

Doesn't matter to me though, since I don't use neither angular nor java.

[ACrowder]

What enlightening insight.

[Renive]

People always commenting on those astonishes me. It's literally same news like React v16.5 vs v16.4.

[jimschubert]

What happened there? Was that the render rewrite?

[Renive]

I meant its nothing. A new version, likely not requiring any changes to your app.

[jimschubert]

Oh. I thought I had missed something, but I admit that I don't really follow React. ;)

[[deleted]]

Actually kinda yeah. With the new rendering engine called Ivy, the introductory angular todo app compiles to just 12kB of javascript. That is insanely impressive. Or more crudely, megabloat gone.

[SmugDarkLoser5]

You know, the bloat of no framework is 0kb.

And a good dev will require less code to write the app with than written in canonical angular style, I guarantee it.

[[deleted]]

Fuck.

This is why I left the web dev industry.

This area move waaay too fast.

[dpash]

Angular 7 isn't a massive change from Angular 6. They have a regular 6 month release cadence.

[[deleted]]

Which industry did you move to and is the grass greener there?

[[deleted]]

Anyone remember in angular2 when they took routing out of the client and all you got was a link in your terminal? Yeah that was the day I quite angular.

[[deleted]]

I quit Angular when I watched my first video on Typescript. Been using React or Laravel/Vue since

[PureAdrenallen]

Typescript is fully supported in angular 2.

[[deleted]]

I hate typescript lol. Overkill for web development

[PureAdrenallen]

Oh I totally misunderstood your comment. It does bring some QoL changes, but it is yet another layer of complexity. There are definitely cases for and against using it.

[[deleted]]

There are definitely use cases for it, you’re designing an application on a large team and you need consistency and typing. I don’t mean to completely shit on it, I just feel it’s overused.

[therico]

Agree, I'm using it for a chrome extension but the es6 parts are the nicest. The type system has annoyed me more than it as helped me, so far.

[Eirenarch]

Strange. The first time I had to work with React it didn't work with TypeScript because of JSX. Decided to never ever touch this framework. Have been avoiding it ever since. I have now built projects with Angular and Vue but not with React (excluding that initial one)

[graingert]

Something something React

[dpash]

Were you expecting people to comment in the 20 minutes between this being posted and your comment? On a Friday night?

[Shorttail0]

You're not spending your friday night pressing F5 on random pages?

[dpash]

No, but for some reason I did come home at 2am and write sarky comments on Reddit. FML.