Some highlights of day two of ng-conf 2016:
- Day two started with a focus on the future of Angular2. No, they didn’t announce Angular3, but they did focus on the work they are finishing up and looking towards the future. For example, work is in progress to build an offline compiler for Angular2 applications. This should greatly reduce the payload delivered to the browser. In fact the Angular2 team’s aggressive goal is to have the “Hello World” version of an an Angular2 application be only 10K!
- A second release candidate came out today. Part of the changes from beta to release candidate includes changing the package references. For example,
angular2/core is now referenced as @angular/core. This change allows for better use of the ES2015 modules and better optimization when using the offline compiler.
- The Material Design team is creating a base set of services that are common to user interface components in general, such as mobile usage, accessibility, internationalization, overlays, and more. The broad set of material design components build on these services, but other components can as well. They are also looking to expand the set of components to things like a Google Map component, a video player, rich text editor, and more.
- Tools have been created for assisting in upgrading Angular1 applications to Angular2. During the upgrade, Angular1 hosts Angular2 components. Angular1 components and services can be upgraded to be used by Angular2 components and services. Likewise, Angular2 components and services can be downgraded and used by Angular1 components. This allows you to migrate an Angular1 application piecemeal instead of using a “big-bang” rewrite.
- The Component Router was updated significantly from Beta to the Release Candidate. The Beta router was in fact deprecated. There are still features to add to the latest router code (such as the RouteData service, default routes, and protected routes), but it is functional as it is. In the Angular2 router, components define their own routes, rather than defining all routes up front. This also allows for dynamically loading routes, rather than having to load an entire SPA implementation all at once.
- NativeScript continues to impress. NativeScript allows you to write truly native mobile applications using Javascript. These applications use native user interface on the device, not user interface run within a web frame. It is similar to the recently acquired Xamarin platform, except that Javascript is the language used rather than C#. The integration with Angular2 allows you to use the same property and event binding as you would in web applications, except on native components.
- The NativeScript team was so impressed with the “Generative Art” presentation that they took the code and published an Android application in the Google Play Store the very next day! Nice!
- Jeffrey Whelpey and Patrick Stapleton gave a more in-depth presentation about Angular Universal features that really demonstrated its power. The team has created a starter application that you can learn from and talked about some of the configuration and setup required to use it. Universal delivers the server-rendered Angular2 application while the preboot function records events from a user (such as a keystroke or mouse click) and then replays these events once the server-rendered application is replaced with the client-rendered code. This should greatly enhance the user’s experience with our web applications. There are even scenarios where Universal can be used in dealing with static rendering that is stored on a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
Looking forward to Day Three!